The Crisis Of Our Civilization

THE CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Other books by Hilaire Billot

The Hedce and the Horse

Conversations with a Cat

Charles the First : King of England

Joan of Arc

Cranuer

Cromwell

Napoleon

Wolsey

Milton

Richelieu

The County of Sussex
The Battle Ground
The Crusade

THE

CRISIS OF OUR
CIVILIZATION

By

HILAIRE BELLOC

CASSELL AND COMPANY LTD.
London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney

First Published - ijjy

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Tbt Cbaptl Rn*r Pnss, And**-. Hants

CONTENTS

PACT

Introduction ...... i

I The Foundation of Christendom . . 7

II Christendom Established

(A) The Siege of Christendom : A.D.500

to a.d. 1000 . . . -57

(B) The High Middle Ages . . .78

(C) The Decline of the Middle Ages . 93

[II The Reformation and its Immediate Con-
sequences 109

[V The Ultimate Consequences of the Refor-
mation

(A) Growth of the Proletariat and hence

of Capitalism . . . . 135

(B) Communism . . . .164

V Restoration . . . . . .191

Index . ..... 243

INTRODUCTION

This work contains the matter of the lec-
tures I delivered at Fordham University
between February 16 and May 18, 1937.
To put the matter in book form I have
arranged it not by single lectures but by
groups into which my thesis naturally
falls. That thesis may be discovered in
the title I have given to the whole, The
Cnsis of our Civilization.

THIS book is an historical presentation to the follow-
ing effect :

That our civilization, that is, the civilization of
Christendom, today occupying Europe, especially West-
ern Europe, and radiating thence over the New World,
acting also as a leader or instructor of the other cultures
in Asia and Northern Africa, has arrived at a crisis
where it is in peril of death.

I propose therefore to describe how that civilization
arose, upon what main lines it developed, what institu-
tions it produced and depended upon. I next propose
to show how it became disunited and thereby spiritually
enfeebled while materially progressing, until at last, witn
the destruction of the moral tradition by which it had
existed and was precariously maintained, it lost its very
principle of life and may therefore, unless we return to
that principle, dissolve.

My thesis in other words is this :

That the culture and civilization of Christendom —
what was called for centuries in general terms “ Europe ”
— was made by the Catholic Church gathering up the
social traditions of the Graeco-Roman Empire, inspiring
them and giving the whole of that great body a new
life. It was the Catholic Church which made us, gave
us our unity and our whole philosophy of life, and
formed the nature of the white world. That world —
Christendom — went through the peril of the barbaric
pagan assault from without as also, from within, the
victorious pressure of a great heresy — which soon became
a new religion-^-Mohammedanism.

These perils it survived, though shorn of much of its
territory ; it re-arose after the pressure was past and
entered the high life of the Middle Ages, which in the
Xlth, Xllth, and especially the XHIth centuries reached
a climax or summit wherein we were most ourselves and
3

4 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

our civilization most assured. But from various causes
(of which perhaps old age was the chief) that great
period showed signs of decline at the beginning of the
XlVth century ; a decline which hastened rapidly
throughout the XVth century. The Faith by whicn we
live was increasingly doubted ; and the moral authority
upon which all depended was more and more contested.
The society of Christendom thus underwent a heavy
strain threatening disruption ; it became more and more
unstable, until at last in the early XVIth century came
the explosion which had been feared and awaited for so
long. That disaster is called in general usage “ The
Reformation.”

From that moment onwards throughout the XVIth
and XVIIth centuries and the XVIIIth, on through the
XIXth, the unity of Christendom having disappeared
and the vital principle on which its life depended having
become weak or distracted, our culture became a house
divided against itself, and therefore increasingly im-
perilled. This evil fortune was accompanied by a rapid
increase in external knowledge, that is, in science and
the command of man over material things, even as he
lost his grasp of spiritual truths. It was the converse
of what had happened in the beginning of our civilization.
Then our religion had saved the ancient world just as
it was perishing and formed a new culture, though
burdened by a decline in science and the arts and
material things.

Our increase in knowledge of the externals and in our
power over nature did nothing to appease the rapidly
growing internal strains of our world. The conflict
between rich and poor, the conflict between opposing
national idolatries, the lack of common standards and
of the fixed doctrines upon which they used to depend
had led up by the beginning of the XXth century to
the brink of chaos ; and threatened such dissention
between mep as to destroy Society. In this crisis the
only alternatives are recovery through the restoration
of the Catholic Faith or the extinction of our culture.

INTRODUCTION 5

Such is the scheme of this book.

I have divided it according to certain groups, five
in number.

The first group deals with the Foundation of Christen-
dom. by the conversion of the Graeco-Roman Empire just
before it failed from despair, but not in time to save it
from material decline. That process covers, roughly,
the first five centuries of our era, that is, up to a.d. 500.

The next group deals with the great ordeal wherein
civilization was tested and with difficulty emerged
restored in the high moment of the True Middle Ages,
to be followed by their decline. It is a period of,
roughly, a thousand years, from the VTth to the XVth
century inclusive — a.d. 500 to a.d. 1500. It falls
naturally into three subdivisions : the Siege of Christen-
dom, the High Middle Ages and their Decline.

The third group concerns the Reformation, that is, the
disruption of our society, and the sowing of those seeds
which were later to threaten our very existence ; the
independence of each separate province of Christendom
from the rest, the denial of any common moral authority
over them, the affirmation of the Sovereign State owing
allegiance to none and free to destroy any of its fellows,
and itself open to a similar fate without appeal ; the
destruction of co-operative social life and the growing
tyranny of wealth.

The fourth group is concerned with the process
whereby these moral and social evils following on the
disruption of Christendom, coupled with a rapidly
increasing knowledge of nature and a consequent develop-
ment of communications and all external aptitudes, led
at last to the opposition throughout what had once been
the Christian world, of the rich against the poor ; the
partial enslavement of the latter, their destitution, their
dependence upon a minority of pay-masters— the reaction
against such inhuman conditions of insufficiency and
insecurity and the formulating of this reaction first in
the vague terms of what used to be called Socialism,
later the precise, doctrinal and intense form of what is

6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

now universally known as Communism. Communism and
its opponent, the Catholic Church — the traditions by
which Christendom had been formed and lived and the
proposal to destroy those traditions altogether, par-
ticularly the religion upon which everything depends —
now stand face to face.

The fifth group concerns the suggested remedies for a
situation so desperate ; for if Communism be accepted
as an apparent solution it is the end of our culture, of
all by which we have lived.

There only remains as an alternative to apply the
fruits which the Catholic culture had produced when it
was in full vigour, the restriction of monopoly, the
curbing of the money power, the establishment of
co-operative work, and the wide distribution of private
property, the main principle of the Guild and the

Jealous restriction of usury and competition, which
>etween them have come so near to destroying us.

But these better conditions are themselves the fruit
of the Catholic Church, they can neither be created nor
maintained in an atmosphere deprived of Catholic
philosophy. The conclusion of the series is therefore
that in the reconversion of our world to the Catholic
standpoint lies the only hope for the future.

I

THE FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM
(a.d. 27-33 TO A*D- 5°°)

I WOULD la y it down at the beginning that the
present crisis in our civilization is the gravest affecting
that civilization since first it took on its essential char-
acter, between 1,900 and 1,600 years ago.

During the whole of that very long period of time
there has been present upon this earth and in that district
of the world which seems to have been set apart for the
leadership thereof a well-defined, clearly recognizable
culture, to which our forefathers gave the appropriate
name — ^Christendom. It arose upon a certain founda-
tion, the pagan Grasco-Roman Empire of antiquity ; it
developed through the impact and influence upon this
of the Catholic Church ; it grew in spiritual character
and energy throughout some 500 years in the midst of
which Catholicism had already become the accepted
philosophy, morals and religion of our blood. It even
expanded beyond the boundaries of that highly civilized
antique state wherein it had arisen, it transformed the
heathen beyond the boundaries of that state, spreading
to include outer parts of it which the original Roman
polity had not directly ruled ; it suffered attack from
without and grave material decline from within, but
it survived.

Not only did Christendom survive ; it flowered after
its long ordeal of the Dark Ages, and was perhaps at its
highest in the centuries immediately following (the Xlth,
Xllth, XHIth, XIVth and XVth), which we call the
Middle Ages.

Having so expanded, withstood its first perils and
grown established, it suffered, 400 years ago, a peril of
disruption. It was nearly destroyed by internal faction ;
dispute upon its primary and creative doctrines wrecked
in part at least its main institutions. But so much of
of it yet again survived as to maintain the continuity of
9

10 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

culture. Christendom, though at war within itself
during the XVIth and XVIIth centuries, was still
Christendom ; the primary doctrines and their con-
sequent social habits (whereby Europe and her expansion
overseas lived) still stood in the general mind of men.
But the struggle had been heavy, the loss of unity and
therefore of personality in that great body was in-
creasingly apparent.

At first only a minority lost the full Christian
traditions : then, till the late XVIIIth century, the
mass of Europe itself and the colonies which Europe had
planted beyond the ocean, still lived by the rules, if
not of the Faith, at any rate of accepted conduct which
they had inherited from so great a past.

But the process of dissolution continued. During the
XIXth century the core of the affair was diluted and
grew weaker; certain prime established things which
had formed the structure of Christendom were shaken.
Within two generations they were tottering. The
characteristic unity of Christendom was already more
than half forgotten ; each of its parts, now wholly
separate, had already long arrogated to itself complete
sovereignty, and therefore implicitly denied the corporate
life of the whole : while within the structure institutions
which were bound into the common heritage, cementing
it and giving it unity, were dissolving.

Marriage was beginning to be challenged. Family
and Property still stood, but their moral bases began to
be questioned. Civil authority had gone the way of
spiritual, its basis also was disputed and its security was
therefore failing. The ancient canon of morals, the
chief characteristic of Christendom, in sexual and

Sersonal as in general and civil relations, was challenged,
oubted and confused. It was losing its vigour, changing
from an unquestioned fixity to a debated mass of fluid
opinion. All this process has reached its climax in our
own time.

Meanwhile there has necessarily proceeded side by ride
with the general decay of the ancient and once apparently

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM u

permanent moral structure, a social and economic change
springing from the same roots but of more immediate
consequence, because it directly affects the lives of men
in a fashion that each can appreciate and with which
all are directly and vividly concerned.

The livelihood of men had become insecure. Over
wide departments of many nations there had arisen in
the most part of society insecurity and destitution on
such a scale that existence threatened to be soon in-
tolerable for its victims. Even as this awful challenge
to human society approached its climax, all hope of
dealing with it by a commonly accepted philosophy
seemed to have been lost.

In other words, that by which the leaders of mankind
had lived, that by which the white civilization had been
what it was, that from which what had been for so long
most properly called Christendom, had drawn its per-
sonality, its will, its honour, its very self, was and is
melting away.

It is with justice, then, that we speak of the Crisis of
Our Civihzation. It is with justice that we apply that
very grave term to the moment in which we have the
misfortune or the combative glory to live.

So emphatic a description of the menace under which
we lie may seem exaggerated to those who have not
considered the contrast between our day and the long
centuries of accepted morals preceding it. It is not
exaggerated. It is in due proportion and true. We are
in peril, here and now, of losing all that by which and
for which our fathers lived, and which we still know to
be, though in apparently active dissolution, our in-
heritance.

In the presence of any great crisis the task in hand is
the solution thereof ; and as this crisis is the greatest of
all historically known to us, the task before us is also the
greatest and the arrival at a solution the most practical
end which men of our blood have ever had set before
them.

Throughout the world, European and Transoceanic,

iz CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

uncertain efforts inspired by the necessity of arriving at
some solution are beginning in a confused fashion to be
attempted. They differ in character. The two main
schools in those who pursue these efforts are opposed
and in mortal conflict — yet at some solution we must
arrive and arrive in common.

It is the business of this book to examine the nature
of the problem and discover, if it be possible, the policy
to be applied which may successfully dissipate the mortal
threat overhanging us.

The Sphinx has asked us its final and weightiest
riddle ; we must find an answer to it or die.

A crisis is of its nature a strain ; it connotes unstable
equilibrium. The settling of a crisis, the recovery of
fixed and acceptable conditions, is the resolution of that
strain. The strain arises from unstable equilibrium
between the component parts and circumstances of
anything : the unstable equilibrium must be reduced
again to stability under pain of destruction. Thus in
the nervous system of a human being there may arise a
strain under which the faculties of intelligence and of
will, the judgment of the senses, the whole balanced
affair, falls into disarray. The strain will be resolved by
the restoration of the co-ordinated faculties ; that is, by
the cure of the sufferer and his re-establishment in
sanity ; or it will be resolved by a breakdown which we
call madness. A chemical combination when it is un-
stable must either be resolved by the separation of its
component parts or the rearrangement of them in a
stable form ; or letting the instability resolve itself by
the disaster of an explosion.

Or take a building, a tall tower for example, which
becomes unstable, leaning over at a perilous angle. We
may pull it down in time and rebuild it or shore it up
sufficiently to permit of strengthening its structure until
it shall be fully established again ; or we may act too
late or unwisely, so that through our delay or blunder

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 13

the mass will fall to the ground, cease to be what it
was and be lost. Under any crisis (that is under any
special strain), in order to act wisely and prevent the
threatened disaster, we must discover two things. First,
how serious it is, for only when we know that can we
say whether this or that perhaps drastic and painful
effort is worth while. Next, what are the canses at
work which have produced the increasing tension, because,
unless we know the cause, we cannot devise a remedy.

Now in the case of the modem strain, in the case of
this “ final crisis of our civilization,” wherein the quarrel
between the dispossessed and the possessed, the exploited
and the exploiter, the sufferer from injustice and the
beneficiary therefrom threatens to pull down our world,
there can be no question as to the seriousness of the issue.
It is of maximum seriousness. It is as serious as it can
be. What is more it is immediate. It is upon us.

But as to its cause, that is another matter : it is
because men dispute so much upon its cause that they
differ so much as to the remedy. Yet unless we are
right upon the cause and can choose the applicable
remedy, we perish. Now how shall we make up our
minds upon the cause f How shall we judge the inmost
character of the thing with which we have to deal ?

There is but one main method of approach, and that
method is to follow and appreciate the history of the
thing now in danger of death — our Society. To under-
stand how Christendom came to be and what is indeed
the inmost principle whereby it was for so long that which
it was, and only at this long last has come to sudden
failure, we must follow its growth and maintenance.
The problem is organic ; we must appreciate the nature
of the living thing in order to cure it, now that it is in
mortal sickness. That nature we can only know by
seeing how it was bom, and grew, and lived.

What, then, was the story of Christendom, and why
has that story now come to be threatened with an end ?
History upon all this is our guide ; the history of what
we were explains what we are.

i4 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

In approaching an y historical statement, especially
one concerned with a long historical process, there are
certain rules to be observed lest national and religious
bias even more than the inevitable limitations of the
individual student should warp the truth. We can get
as near an approximation of the truth as is reasonable
to expect by keeping in mind certain postulates from
which these rules of right historical judgment are to
be drawn. Whether in the question I am now under-
taking I have duly observed these rules it will be for
those who read to judge ; but I have attempted to
observe them and I desire to state them thus at the
outset, because they seem to me of the first importance.

We are about to answer the main question, “ What
happened in the making of Europe ? ” We are about
to attempt the drawing of a large outline which shall
be true : which corresponds to reality.

But can that be done f Can true history be written
even in broad outline ? I think it can ; and I will beg
leave to digress for a discussion of this before beginning
the account of Christendom.

There are four main postulates to be granted before
we can proceed to our enquiry on the past.

The first postulate is this : “ Truth Lies in Proportion ”
You do not tell an historical truth by merely stating a
known fact ; nor even by stating a number of facts in a
certain and true order. You can only tell it justly by
stating the known things in the order of their value.

It has been objected by unthinking men that history is
necessarily uncertain because it necessarily consists in the
facts selected by the narrator, and since he can leave out
what he chooses the result may be almost anything. But
this is to presuppose that the man who is telling the
story is not desirous of presenting the truth. Suppose
he be so desirous, he will only achieve his object by a
just selection : that is by selection according to the
order of value, giving chief weight to what is most
important in connection with his narrative, less weight
to what is less important, and omitting, as he is bound

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

15

to omit within some limits, however large, what is least
important. This is especially clear in the case of general
statement on so large a matter as the establishment of a
civilization, its origin, character and development. But
how and why it is proportion that determines history
may be seen by a particular example.

Suppose a man who knows nothing of English literature
say to you, “ Who is William Shakespeare ? I see his
name continually ; who and what was he ? ” If you
answer, “ He was a man of the middle class of society
bom near Stratford-on-Avon some three centuries and
a half ago. He proceeded to London as a young man
and there became an actor” — you are stating troths,
but you are not stating the truth. You are not putting
in your statement the main fact first. The true answer
of course is, “ William Shakespeare is the greatest writer
of English, the greatest English poet, and among the
very first poets of ancient and modem times.” If your
limits allow you to expand this statement you can next
give his date, after that go into the nature of his work,
then deal with his social position, with the amount of
his known writing, and so forth. You can fill in the
outline in as much detail as your space permits — but
you must put the first things first ana the second things
second. If from ignorance or, as is more probable, from
affection for this or that you give wrong values,
emphasizing the lesser at the expense of the greater,
you are not writing true history. You must of course
in the process of your narration admit some word at
least to show why such and such an element is more
important than another ; in other words, you must help
to convince those whom you address of your good faith
and competence ; but anyhow, the mam point is that
historical truth lies (as does all judgment, that is, a right
appreciation of anything) upon a due grasp of proportion.

The second postulate will be less easily accepted than
my first : It is this : — “ Religion is the Main Determining
Element in the Formation of Any Civilization.”

Some would use the word “ philosophy ” rather than

1 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

religion. But a social philosophy, that is, an attitude
with regard to the universe held by great numbers of
men in common for long spaces of time and throughout
a whole society, is inevitably and necessarily clothed
with forms ; it will always and necessarily have some
liturgy of its own, some ritual, some symbols, even though
it does not consciously affirm any transcendental
doctrines.

For example, the modem worship of the nation, the
modem philosophy whereby our prime duty is regarded
as being our duty to the State of which we are members
— the general modem conception that affection for and
loyalty towards our country is the chief political duty of
man — is indeed a philosophy. But it is also in practice
a religion. Modem State-worship has its symbols, its
revered officers, its regular sequence of public ritual and
all the rest of it. And if this is true of a mere philosophy,
a mere mundane attitude towards visible and ephemeral
things, it is quite certainly true of any positive strongly-
held conviction upon the Divine element in the
arrangements of mankind.

A group of human beings which believes, in general
and firmly, that good- or evil-doing in this life are
followed by corresponding consequences after death,
that the individual soul is immortal, that God is one and
the common omnipotent Father of all, will behave in
one way. A group which denies all reality to such ideas
will behave in another. A group which concentrates
its spiritual vision upon the image of terrifying and
maleficent powers will behave thus and thus ; another
group which upon the whole contemplates more genial
powers friendly to man and in tune with beauty will act
otherwise. The whole of a human group is given its
savour and character by the spirit which thus inhabits it ;
and that spirit may justly be called in nearly every case
a religion — although if the term be preferred it may (in
cases where the sense of mystery is weak) be termed
a philosophy.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 17

philosophy the character of those who hold it in common
will be founded as will the character of their culture as
a whole. If such and such things are held in awe,
others in abhorrence, and others again presumed
indifferent, such and such is the result upon Society as
a whole. Change the elements, regard with abhorrence
what was formerly thought of with indifference, with
indifference what was formerly sacred, and the whole
character of your polity is transformed.

Efforts have been made to give some other element
than this element of religion (or philosophy) the determin-
ing character in a civilization. Thus, many seek that
determining character in race or blood : it is one of the
most fashionable theories of the moment in which we
live. Others propose economic circumstances as the
determining element and say that a polity is what it is
through the way in which wealth is produced and
distributed therein. But these and all other explanations
are really no more than the re-statement of a philosophy
or religion. The man who makes race everything (as do
many Germans today) is merely preaching a religion of
race. The man who makes economic circumstance
everything is merely preaching the religion of materialism.
Indeed, to do them justice, both unconsciously proclaim
this truth : that a culture is formed by its religion.
The German Nazi enthusiast for Germanic excellence,
one might almost say for Germanic divinity, proclaims
his confidence in a doctrine. The Marxian Communist
in proclaiming economic circumstance to be everything
does not disguise his open and emphatic materialism.

This second postulate, that religion is the making of a
culture, will upon a sufficient examination, I think, be
granted ; and if it is at first unfamiliar and therefore
doubted, that is because we are accustomed to think of
religion as a private matter, whereas, in social fact, it is a
public one. Things really held to be sacred are held
sacred throughout the society which is affected by
them.

The third postulate is this : “ The Evidence on Which

18 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

We Base Our Historical Conclusion Must Include Much
More Than Documents ; Much More Than Recorded
Statements.” We must use also tradition and common
sense.

Tradition as a foundation for history possesses the
advantage of sincerity and generality. One man or a
clique may get a falsehood accepted, but what a whole
community of witnesses affirms is above board. Time
warps the picture but it is not intentionally false as a
document may be.

Memories passed on from one generation to another
tend of course to be distorted, and if they are written
down very late will often contain false elements of mere
legend. But, on the other hand, tradition is sincere
(which the written evidence of one witness very often
is not) and it is broad-based. Over and over again a
tradition which the learned, depending upon documents
alone, have ridiculed turns out upon the discovery of
further corroboration to be true.

Thus after all the guess-work and various readings of
the Homeric poems, lately discovered papyri in general
confirm the traditional readings. Or again, there
remained for centuries in the popular speech of Paris
the term “ araines ” (variously and later spelled —
“ arenes ”), attaching to a particular quarter of the town.
Learned guesswork did its best with that term and could
make little of it ; what was at any rate generally agreed
upon was that it could have nothing to do with the
Roman word “ arena,” because there was no trace of
a Roman amphitheatre in Paris. Well, in quite modem
times during the construction of the Rue Monge, the
foundations of the first tiers of such an amphitheatre
were laid bare ; and popular tradition was thus confirmed.

These are only two instances where a hundred could
be cited by any widely-read man from memory alone ;
and a thousand or more could soon be established by
research.

This postulate, warning us against the now happily
decreasing tendency to base all history upon document

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

l9

alone, is especially confirmed by tbe growth in importance
of archaeology in recent years.

Then there is the evidence of common sense, that is,
the nature of things. No matter how strong the
tradition or how emphatic and well-supported the
documentary evidence, one must weigh against it the
mere material possibility of this or that — for instance,
the population which can possibly have inhabited a
given area, the number of combatants that can possibly
have occupied a particular line of battle, the time in
which a sailing boat — however fiercely driven — can have
covered a particular distance. History swarms with
examples of particular statements, traditional and docu-
mentary, which are not indeed to be denied entirely,
but to be modified thus by the use of mere reason and
common experience.

Lastly there is a fourth postulate against the neglect
or denials of which a modem audience must be specially
warned. “ True History is Objective.” It does not
depend on the mood of the narrator.

Such and such an historical truth remains true whether
the man appreciating it is in sympathy with the event
or not. The Pagan who deplores the advance of the
Church in the IVth century — the biographer of Julian
the Apostate, for instance — and his contemporary who
exults in the triumph of the Church and the defeat of
Paganism are both stating a plain historical fact, that
Paganism receded and the Catholic Church advanced
between the years 300 and 400. An indifferent
observer who cared for neither Paganism nor the Church
would equally acknowledge that established truth.

The worthy writer of history is he who can so detach
himself as to say, “ This happened, and it happened thus.
I will describe it as though I cared nothing one way or
the other.” He may indeed care passionately ; he may
deplore as an awful tragedy or applaud as a glorious
triumph the same event : history as such should care
nothing for his applause or his grief, it is concerned only
with the establishment of what was.

zo CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Armed with such principles let us begin our study of
that great affair : “What we of Christendom are and
how we came to be so.”

We are studying an organism, to wit our civilization,
Christendom. We are occupied in appreciating its
nature, the spirit by which it lived and was maintained
for so many centuries ; we are doing this in order further
to understand its breakdown today and the consequent
mortal peril in which we he.

Now in studying an organism it is essential to begin
by appreciating its origins. It is both a truth and a
commonplace that to understand a human character you
must know the influences that came upon it in very early
youth, during the “ formative period.” The same is
true of a State, a polity, a nation, a general culture ; and
it is profoundly true of Christendom. Christendom
arose upon a certain foundation which, becoming alive,
changed from a foundation to a root. Our origin
appears in a certain arrangement of human Society
whence we all descend ; a great united State to which
all that we do and think of any consequence refers as a
beginning.

That vast State was called historically the “ Roman
Empire ; ” a more accurate term and one now
increasingly used is the “ Graeco-Roman ” Empire ; for
the language, local religion and literature of the educated
classes and officials and even in actual numbers of the
bulk of the people was the Roman speech (that is, Latin)
in the West, and the Greek speech in the East. The
influences connected with those two idioms, Roman law,
Greek philosophy and letters, were closely intermixed
throughout the whole. Every Latin-speaking man of
high social position was trained in the use of the Greek
tongue, which for the more cultivated was as familiar as
his own. It is not equally true that the Greek-speaking
part of the Empire was intimately familiar with Latin,
for Greek was regarded by both parties as the superior
medium of culture and every administrator within the
Greek-speaking half of the Empire had come to take

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 21

Roman law and the Roman discipline as a matter
of course.

This great united State within which there were no
customs, boundaries nor national frontiers, but which
was all one political thing, covered the districts we now
call Belgium and most of Holland, France, Italy, Spain
and Portugal, all North Africa lying between the desert
and the Mediterranean, what we now call Greece and
the Balkan States, most of Austria, Turkey and Asia
Minor, most of Syria. All these became in political life
one nation, the area of which measured well over 2,000
miles from east to west and at its broadest part between
the mouths of the Rhine and the Sahara over a thousand.
The thing had taken on this shape and unity in final
form a lifetime before the Incarnation of Our Lord ;
but it had not settled down so early into an accepted
general base. Rival claimants for power, each using
armed forces at their disposal and rival factions within
the central power of Rome, kept it fluctuating within and
its fate uncertain until nineteen years before the beginning
of our era.

The Eastern, which was also roughly the Greek, half
of this immense territory was the more thickly
populated and the wealthiest ; the Western half had
on the whole the greater dignity because it contained,
and was especially moulded by, the City of Rome, whence
the government of the whole from east to west and
north to south had spread in the course of the preceding
three or four centuries.

The dividing lines between the Western and Eastern
halves ran up the Adriatic Sea and through the tangle
of mountains between the head of that sea and the
Danube. The only land frontiers of the great thing
on the Continent were two rivers, the Rhine and the
Danube ; the boundary was the Rhine on the east
following the river up the first two-thirds of its length,
then cutting across the upper part of the Danube, thence
running down the Danube to the Black Sea. Beyond
this line were tribes and clans who spoke various Germanic

22 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

dialects largely and increasingly affected by the Greek
and Latin of their more civilized neighbours. Beyond
these again were tribes even still more barbaric, speaking
Slavonic dialects. Neither those of Teutonic nor those
of Slav speech had any political cohesion ; they fell
naturally more and more under the influence of the
civilized, imperial society according as they lived nearer
to the Rhine and the Danube, and had more intercourse
with the soldiers and citizens and merchants of the
Empire. There was no hostility or ill feeling between
the organized and civilized society within the boundaries
and the less and less organized, more and more barbaric
outside. There was some pressure from outside which
took the form of occasional raids, or even of large armed
incursions. That was inevitable, because the outer men
naturally desired to enjoy the greater amenities of life
within the frontiers of civilization. There was also
equally inevitably a drift of outer men seeking better
fortune through recruitment in the Imperial Army or
private services, or through a sort of colonization of the
imperial lands where they were permitted to settle.
There was also no small infiltration through commerce,
including the trade in slaves ; but it is important for
us to see the Grteco-Roman Empire of this period, just
before our era, and on for generations, not as a sharply
distinct civilized thing surrounded by mere barbarism,
but as an influence which more and more affected the
populations outside its political boundaries, and in its
turn was affected by them through an admixture of
external blood. From the beginning you find plenty of
outer men as soldiers and slaves and even as settlers, let
alone as visitors of consequence among the citizens of
the Empire, whether in origin they were from Celtic
or Slav or German clans outside the strictly defined
frontier. Similarly you could find merchants travels
ling from within the frontier to places as far as the
Baltic.*

* There are trace! of a Roman road ru
the north coast of the Germamei

Cologne

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 23

Although, as 1 have said, two main official languages
dominated East and West of this single state, Greek and
Latin, there was a considerable number of major language
groups different from both, and innumerable lesser
dialects spoken.

The State was not centralized in our modern sense ;
its local arrangements were freer than ours today.
Localities were subject (save in major matters) to local
administration alone. Magistrates were often elected
and always in tune with local feeling and usually native
as well, though there were put over large districts, as
governors, officials appointed by the main council of the
Roman State — the Senate — and the chief of the Roman
executive, the Emperor.

In what we call today Tunis the language most spoken
by the people was Semitic of a sort called “ Punic,” from
its Phoenician origins. Further west along the southern
coast of the Mediterranean, up to and including Morocco
and the town of Tangier, the local dialects were probably
Berber. Within what is now Spain and Portugal, Iberian
idioms were spoken. In what is today France and most
of Belgium, Celtic idioms survived, though these were
to die out rapidly under the influence of Rome, a sort
of popular Latin taking their place. All along the Rhine
in a broad belt the citizens of the Empire spoke various
Teutonic (that is, Germanic) tongues, as they did
presumably along the Danube, and certainly within the
frontiers between the upper courses of those two rivers.
In Asia Minor there were many idioms spoken, including
a relic of Gaulish Celtic, remaining like a fossil from
earlier Gallic invasions which had reached thus far east-
ward. The Delta and the Valley of the Nile were, as
far as the population went, Coptic in speech, that is,
using an idiom drawn from the ancient Egyptian tongue,
though the riding families spoke Greek. Similarly along
the Syrian sea coast, including Palestine and all the belt
between Syria and the Mediterranean, varieties of local
languages (nearly all of them Semitic in character) were
the habituid speech of the people. There is one par-

24 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

ticularly important to the story of our civilization —
Hebrew, in its later form Aramaic — which was talked in
Jerusalem, Galilee and all that we later came to call the
Holy Land. It was probably the tongue in which Our
Lord Himself and His Apostles spoke, though they must
certainly have been acquainted with Greek also and
have used it when a wide audience was being appealed
to, for Greek was the cultivated and written language
of Palestine.

It should be noted that though there was no political
hostility, no conscious feeling of national or racial enmity
along the enormously long frontiers of the Empire, there
was one sector where such enmity and permanent political
conflict could be found ; that was the fluctuating frontier
between the Roman Empire and the Asiatic and Persian
power. Rome occasionally pushed as far as the Euphrates
and even to the Tigris ; the Persian power representing
Asia and its hostility to the European would thrust back
the Roman power at intervals to the Syrian desert and
even later make incursions as far as the Mediterranean
seaboard. It was upon this frontier alone that Rome
feared invasion and influences destructive of all Greek
and Latin culture. For the rest, there was either peace
(and peace endured for long periods and was for genera-
tions the normal product of that united government
which protected by its army all that lay within the
frontiers), or, where there were raids across the frontiers
and the menace of raids, such fighting as took place was
police work rather than war.

This enormous Graeco-Roman State and culture had
been built up by the coalescence of a number of diverse
city-states and lesser kingdoms rather than by conquest.
We must not imagine Roman armies proceeding from the
City of Rome and gradually subduing all Western
humanity by force until all obeyed the master of those
armies resident in the central town of Rome itself. That
is a way in which the thing is often regarded and it is
thoroughly unhistorical. The Graeco-Roman Empire
had grown. It had not been artificially or mechanically

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 25

made , although in step after step of this growth military
action had come in to consolidate the results of sucn
growth or secure it from disorder.

In Italy the thing had been begun by the town of
Rome, a large central market fixed at an essential nodal
point in the communications of the peninsula ; the point
where the first bridge crossed the main river of the
eastern Italian seaboard. The inhabitants of that
district had petty skirmishes with their neighbours and
also alliances with them. These feuds and treaties and
commercial arrangements resulted in a sort of small
central State occupying the fertile land between the
Apennines and the sea. The principle of coalescence,
including the further recruitment of the expanding
citizenry into any army which had originally been but a
militia of Romans, continued until all Italy south of the
Po was directly or indirectly involved in it. Greek
colonies to the south joined the union or fought against
it and were subdued.

The irreductable foe of the whole movement was the
very wealthy Semitic society of Carthage, replaced today
by the neighbouring capital of Tunis in North Africa.
Carthage depended upon sea power and upon its in-
calculable wealth, that of a mercantile aristocratic trading
and banking state. All its morals and ideas were in acute
antagonism to those of our race : and Rome entered into
a struggle with Carthage wherein the latter was destroyed.
Meanwhile the Greek civilization had also coalesced, its
unity springing from original efforts which had repelled
the Orientals and their attempted invasion of the
European mainland. The Greek culture was gathered
under the rule of an outer province thereof, Macedonia,
to the north. A young King of Macedonia with a small
Greek expeditionary force had swept through the near
East and suddenly planted the Greek language and
influence and ideas upon all the eastern shores of the
Mediterranean, and far inland as well. His armies even
reached the river Indus, and when he died as quite a
young man (little more than thirty), though his empire

26 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

was divided among his generals, its spiritual unity as a
Greek thing survived.

Rome in eliminating Carthage had come into possession
of the islands of the western Mediterranean and ultimately
most of what is today Spain and North Africa ; her
armies were superior to the Greek-speaking armies now
orientalized and therefore recruited from inferior
material. Rome entered into the inheritance of Alex-
ander and his successors. She entered into it, however,
not as an enemy but respectfully, as a spiritual ally
and even as a pupil — of such prestige was the philosophy
and spiritual tradition of Hellas.

Thus it was that the universal Mediterranean State,
the Graeco-Roman Empire, expanded, consolidated and
was fixed, until, as I have said, half a lifetime before the
birth of Our Lord, universal peace and a consolidated
State lay over all the known Western World, from
Mesopotamia to the Atlantic and from the Channel to
the Sahara.

The framework of all that society was, from the nature
of its expansion, the army. The idea of a State dependent
on its army is unfamiliar to us today, but one that seemed
to the men of the time the most natural in the world.
The Roman army, which was, of course, no longer com-
posed of Romans or even of Italians for the most part,
but recruited from the whole territory, was the cement
of the whole structure. Its engineers planned the great
roads which bound the Empire together ; it was the
principle of order and discipline which informed the
whole. Its commander-in-chief was the head of the
State. It is from that title “Commander-in-Chief”
that we get the word “Emperor,” which is but our
modern derivative of the Latin name for a commander-
in-chief: “Imperator.”

We have noted that this universal government of the
West exerted but little or no pressure upon private life.
There was none of that detailed interference with men’s
daily actions which the modem State has so strictly
developed. All that the State was concerned to do was

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 27

to impose major rules for the guidance of the Courts of
Law, especially in matters of property and contract, and
to prevent private war and brigandage. As for opinion,
even in the form of intense religious feeling, that was
free so long as it did not challenge the State. Only
certain practices abhorrent to the conscience of our race
and the high civilization of Greece and Rome — such as
human sacrifice, the vilest product of the Semitic Cartha-
ginian religion — were put down.

For the rest, the philosophy or general religion which
ran through the whole political body was a complex of
myths, varying liturgies and worships, secret societies
professing to receive spiritual aid lay initiation, and
therefore perform mysteries.

Various powerful schools of thought upon the nature
of the universe, most of them Greek in origin, formed
cross sections in all this. There was the Epicurean
school, very nearly what we call today Materialists ; the
Platonic, which was conscious of and relied upon spiritual
reality ; even the sceptics, who gave up all certitude
as hopeless of achievement. All these and any other
opinions had free course. The worship of the local gods
in each city-state was carried on under the protection of
the local government ; the strange rites of Egypt, the
special ceremonies of the Syrian cities, and even the
recalcitrant, assertive, special religious organization of the
Jews.

These last were at their most vital in their original
homeland, the limestone bills of Judea with the national
temple at Jerusalem ; but they were also dispersed far
and wide, and when the story of Christendom opens one
could find Jewish merchants and money-dealers all over
the Empire, with their synagogues in most of the main
cities. They were very numerous in Rome itself, most
numerous of all in the main Mediterranean port of
Alexandria. All were tolerated ; and the Jews were
given a specially privileged position because the intensity
of their racial feeling might endanger the peace if it
were thwarted,
c

28 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

The influence both of Greek philosophy and Roman
law made for the acceptation throughout this wide
political body, the Empire, of what is called in our
theology “ natural religion ” ; the institution of the
family with its loyalties and disciplines, therefore of
marriage, of property whereby the freedom and secure
existence of the family is maintained ; the duty of
maintaining social order — all that makes up, apart from
revelation, the duty of man, as the instincts of our race
see that duty. Of worship common to all society there
was none, save a very vague and formal recognition of
something divine about public authority as centred in the
Emperor, and a kind of divine mission attached to the
town of Rome itself. All this did not intimately afFect
the lives of men, which in so far as they were touched
by religion at all were touched only by decaying ancestral
myths ; more vigorous (because more recent) philo-
sophies ; popular, domestic and local idolatries.

It is natural for us after generations and centuries of
Christian formation to ask, “ Had Pagans no sense of
immortality ; did they not look to rewards and punish-
ments in a future life to compensate for the inequalities
and injustices of this world f ” The answer to that
question is that there was some such sentiment abroad,
but nowhere very vital or active, until the Gauls, who
alone were vividly conscious of immortality, began to
permeate the Empire a lifetime before the Incarnation.

The Egyptians seem to have had from of old (for their
wealthier classes at least and in the custody of their strict
priesthood) an elaborate ritual recognizing the survival
of the soul. In Etruria the tombs — of the governing
class at least — bear witness to the same. One section, and
one section only, of Greek philosophy inclined to similar
ideas ; but nowhere was immortality, least of all in the
form of vivid and certain expectation, a part -of the
popular mind, save among the Gauls. In so far as that
mind contemplated the fate of the dead at all, it thought
of their continuation as something tenuous, ex-sanguine,
weak and most pitiable, presumably evanescent.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 29

When we turn from the general philosophy (which is
the determining element in every Society) to the social
state accompanying it, we discover one most character-
istic difference between that ancient world and our own ;
that difference is the universal presence of slavery as the
economic basis of Society. Slavery was not peculiar to
the Graeco-Roman world. It was present among the
less civilized clans and tribes outside as well. It was
everywhere. At first, no doubt, as in the case of our
own wage-system in its origins, it was mainly a domestic,
familiar and tolerable thing ; but it became, as Society
grew, both more united and more complex : slavery
became a mechanical and oppressive burden weighing
upon the human spirit and giving its tone to all,
for all Society is affected by the spirit of any large part
thereof.

Politically the organization of all that world was a
general monarchy, lie rules of whose civil service were
upon a model mainly taken from the immensely older,
highly organized, very wealthy state of Egypt. For all
local affairs the spirit was rather that of oligarchy,
administration in the hands of local magnates for lesser
affairs, for the small communities a spirit almost what
we should call today democratic. But the structure,
the stuff of Society (which, in importance, over-rides
mere political arrangement) was based upon and rooted
in slavery. The harder work of the world was done
under compulsion ; not under indirect compulsion as it
is in our wage-system, but under direct compulsion of
physical pain and death for the slave who did not
accomplish his task.

What was the major spiritual result of all these things
combined ? A Universal Grasco-Roman society through
which great numbers moved without restriction, plying
their commerce, ordering the army in its marches,
travelling from curiosity or for betterment, and every-
where interchanging ideas and learning, produced a state
of mind in which the universal problem of mortality
imposed itself. A major note was heard at last running

30 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

throughout this high pagan world, with all its splendour
and all its noble appreciation of beauty and order. What
note was that ? It was despair.

The further that pagan civilization proceeds in its
development — a rapid development changing it and
ageing it within three centuries — the more this mood
of despair penetrates it. You feel it in the growing
lethargy of men’s action ; in the sterilization of their
inventive power, and most of all in the continuous
refrain of their highest letters. The greatest verse is
filled with what a modem poet has excellently called in
the English language “ the doubtful doom of human-
kind,” irretrievable certitude that none return from
the dead.

Of a thousand superb lines which might be chosen
to illustrate the profundity of this abandonment,
remember these from the most poignant of the Latin
poets :

“ Soles occidere et redire possunt
Nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux
Nox est perpetua una dormiunda.” *

Note the reading “ dormiunda ” with its mournful
vowels : “ One perpetual night to be slept out.”

It is the cry of Catullus. Grasco-Roman society was
dying. But to say that is only to say half and the less
important half of the truth ; the other half of the truth
is that it was dying of despair — when there arrived a
force whereby it was transformed.

As we approach the conversion of the Roman Empire
(a.d. 29-33 to a.d. 500), we come upon a moment of

* This hat been translated :

" Suns may set and tuns may rise.
Our poor eyes,

When their little light is past.
Droop and go to sleep at last.”

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 31

history so surpassing, in its value and effects, all others
known to us that we must begin bv standing apart and
contemplating its magnitude. That is the essential
point apparent to anyone who cares for reality in history.
The conversion of the Empire to the Faith was not one
episode among the great episodes of our race ; it was
not a chapter, the greatest chapter of many. It was
The Determining Thing. It was not only in scale but
in quality a new Creation.

This is true quite apart from the standing question,
whether that revolution in the human mind were an
illusion or a revelation of reality.

A man concerned with the story of his ancestry on
this earth may judge the Conversion in either of two
ways. He may condemn the great change as a false
turning, a warping of values, a lamentable lessening of
intelligence ; or he may acclaim it as a vision of reality
whereby the world was and can be saved. Whether he
passionately approve or hate the event, it remains an
historical truth that no such reconstruction has to our
knowledge appeared before or since.

Certainly unique in character, the Conversion is also
unique in scale. For whether the momentous change of
our Fathers from pagan to Christian were man-made, or
given to man by Divine influence from above, it remains
in either case unique : something quite by itself and
producing effects not comparable to those of any other
cause.

We must begin by laying it down, again as an historical
fact, not to be removed by affection one way or the other,
that the conversion of the Roman Empire was a con-
version to what was called by all our ancestry and what
is still called by those with any just historical sense, the
Catholic Church.

The Empire was not converted to what modern men
mean when they use the word “ Christianity.” That
word is continually used and as continually corrupts the
historical judgment of those who use it and those who
hear it.

32 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

To modem youth, especially in societies which have
lost the Catholic culture, the word “ Christianity ” means
vaguely, “ That which is common to the various sects,
opinions and moods inherited in diluted form from the
Reformation.” In England today for instance, “ Christi-
anity ” means a general feeling of kindliness — particularly
to animals. To some more precise in mind it may mean
an appreciation of, and even an attempt at copying, a
Character which seems to them portrayed in the four
Gospels (four out of certainly more than fifty, which four
they happen to have inherited from the Catholic Church
— although they do not know it). To a much smaller
number, with greater powers of definition and better
historical instruction, the word “ Christianity ” may
have even so precise a meaning as “ the acceptation of the
doctrine that an historical Figure appeared in Palestine
not quite two thousand years ago, and was in some way
the Incarnation of God, and that the main precepts, at
least, of an original society calling itself after His name
should be our guide for moral conduct.”

But all these uses of the word “ Christianity ” from
the vaguest to the most precise, do not apply to the
tremendous business with which we are here concerned.
The society of the ancient world was not changed from
its antique attitude to that which it finally adopted in
the IVth century (and continued thenceforward to
spread throughout Europe) by any mood or opinion ; it
was transformed by adherence to the doctrine and
discipline as well as the spirit and character of a certain
Institution ; and that Institution is historically known.
It is the Church. The Church is a Personality which
can be tested by certain indisputable attributes, practices
and definitions. It claimed and claims Divine authority
to teach, to include in its membership by a specific form
of initiation those who approach it and are found worthy ;
to exclude those who will not accept its unity and
supremacy. It performed throughout the society of
the Empire (and even beyond its boundaries) a certain
liturgical act of sacrifice, the Eucharist. It affirmed its

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 33

foundation by a Divine figure who was at once Man, and
a manifestation of God. It further affirmed that its
officers held their authority through appointment origin-
ally by this Founder, who gathered a small group for
that very purpose. It affirmed that from the members
of this small original group, in unbroken succession,
descended the spiritual powers which could be claimed
by its officers and by them alone, in a particular manner,
over the whole body of Christians, and, in general
fashion, over the world at large.

In order to understand this very great Thing (not
idea) which captured and transformed the old pagan
world we must grasp its nature. We must be able to
answer three questions. First we must discover what was
that Thing which spread thus so rapidly and so trium-
phantly throughout the Graeco-Roman world ?
Secondly, we must appreciate the method, by which this
revolution was accomplished. Lastly, in order to under-
stand both the nature and the method of the Thing we
must discover why it met with so intense a resistance , for
that resistance explains both its character and its ways
of propagation. It was victory over this intense resist-
ance which established the Catholic Faith and practice
so firmly over our race.

First then, as to the nature of the conquest.

The great change did not come because “ it met a
need ” ; it did indeed meet needs that were universal.
It filled up that aching void in the soul which was the
prime malady of the dying ancient society ; also it relieved
and dissipated despair, the capital burden imposed by
that void.

Yet the meeting of the need was not the essential
character of the new thing ; it was not the driving power
behind the great change ; it was only a result incidental
thereto.

It was not merely in order to assuage such a need of
the spirit that men turned towards the Catholic Church.
Had that been so we should have been able to trace the
steps whereby from vague gropings and half-satisfied

34 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

longings there should have crystallized this and that myth,
this and that fulfilment of desire by imagination, until
the system should have come into being long after the
inception of the first influences.

That such a gradual process did take place is commonly
affirmed by those who have not a sufficient acquaintance,
even on the largest lines, with the thing historically —
but in fact nothing of the kind took place. You discover
not a vague frame of mind, but a definite polity from
the first ; no criticism of documents or of tradition can
present any other conclusion. A Man appeared, gathered
together a certain company and taught. And not only
so soon as that company begins to act, but at the root
of all memory with regard to its action, you have the

S:cific claim of Divine revelation in the Teacher, of
s Human and Divine nature ; of His resurrection
from the dead ; of His establishing a central rite of
Sacrifice, which was called the Eucharist (the Act of
Gratitude) ; the claim to Authority ; the Apostolic
organization of the tradition ; the presence of a Hierarchy
— and all the rest.

The Catholic Church visible was not an influence that

spread ; it was a fixed Corporation, a Club, if you will ;
it was an organization with a form and members, with a
defined outline, and a discipline.

Disputes arose within it, certain of its members would
over-emphasize this or that among the doctrines for which
it stood, and so warp the proportion of the whole. But
no innovator, even during the first enthusiasm when so
many debates surrounded so intellectually vigorous a
thing, would ever pretend that there was not one body
to be preserved. He might claim to be the true
continuator of that body, and protest when he was
excluded from it for dissent ; but never did any one of
those at the origin propose that discord upon essentials
could be permanent.

This new and strict Corporation had a name, a name
associated in the minds of its contemporaries with the
idea of a secret society possessed of Mysteries ; it called

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 35

itself the Ekklesia.* Now it is all-important to grasp
this further fact, that this new Ekklesia with its mysteries,
its initiation ceremonies (instruction in doctrine, solemn
affirmation thereof, called a “ Confession ” — what today
we call a creed — and Baptism) was not one of many
religions. It did not happen to prove the winner in a
sort of race. That is an error which one finds in many
of the textbooks and which has almost passed into popular
acceptance. Any number of our general outlines of
history and the rest talk of the Early Church in this
fashion.

They say, for instance, that the earlier mysteries such
as the mysteries of Eleusis, the later mysteries of Mithras,
and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis, etc., were of this sort ;
and what they call “ Christianity ” (for they usually
avoid the title “ Catholic Church ”) was (they say) but
one mystery religion out of many.

This is not true; and the test that it is not true is
simple and should be conclusive. The Catholic Church
alone and from its origins proclaimed the Divinity of a
real historical Man and the objective truth of the
doctrines which it affirmed Him to have revealed. It
proclaimed from the beginning the Resurrection of
that real historical Man from the dead ; and the popular
nickname, “ Christian ” (which became like so many
nicknames the general term) arose from that fact.

All the other popular worships with their mysteries
and initiations and the rest of it were admittedly myths.
They did not say, “ This happened ” ; what they said
was, “ This is a parable, a symbol to explain to you the
nature and possible fate of the human soul and its relation
to the Divine.” Not one of them said, “ I was founded

* Thu Greek word meant literally * ■ an assembly ” But there were many
Greek terms for an assembly , and tbu term EKKLESIA had long been
used for an assembly closed and compact , especially a secret one for the
celebration of mysteries. And it is from this word that we get the French
"fghse,” the Welsh "eglwyt,” the Italian "chiesa,” etc. The word
"church” or "kirk” came round through the missionaries who spread the
Faith in the north. It is thought to be derived from the Greek "kynakon,”
" the Lord’s house. "

3 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

by a real human being whom other men met and knew,
who lived in a particular place and time ; one to whom
there are ‘ a cloud of witnesses V* Not one of them said
that it was the sole guardian of revealed truth and that
its officials held a Divine commission to explain that
truth throughout the world.

In all this there was a violent contrast between the
Catholic Church and the whole of the pagan world
around it. Neither the intellectuals following Greek
traditions nor the Roman Empire with its administrative
sense of unity persecuted the other associations. It was
not the doctrine of the Resurrection, still less the doctrine
of Immortality which was found repulsive. It was the
affirmation that a criminal who had been put to death
in a known place and time at Jerusalem, under the
Emperor Tiberius, condemned to scourging and to
ignominious death by Crucifixion (whereto no Roman
citizen was liable) was Divine, spoke with Divine
authority, founded a Divine Society, rose from the dead,
and could promise to His faithful followers eternal
beatitude. This was what shocked the intellectuals, but
this also was what gave stuff and substance to that new
society and so led to its persecution.

Now, as to this new Society’s method of expansion :
how did it propagate itself ? What was the machinery
which proved so successful that in less than four long
lifetimes the whole of that hostile society was officially
Catholic, and that within another two long lifetimes the
mass of the population. West and East, of the known
world between the Channel, the Rhine, the Danube and
the desert was joined with the Catholic Church ?

It worked by the method which we have come to call
“ Cells,” a word rendered familiar today through the
universal Communist agitation. If, as some think, that
Communist movement is the final assault upon Catholic
tradition and the Faith, if it be, as many think, the
modern anti-Christ, the parallel is indeed striking. All
over the Grasco-Roman Empire there were founded
rapidly a number of these small organizations, first

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 37

connected with, later separated from, local Jewish
synagogues ; fixed first in the greater towns, but later
scattered like seed throughout the lesser provincial
centres, and then by missionary effort throughout the
countrysides.

We know that this was the method by ample docu-
mentary evidence ; we have also a vast mass of tradition,
largely legendary, of course, after such length of time,
but containing its nucleus of truth, which tells us how
in this place and in that these “ Cells ” were founded
and established.

Each was called individually a Church, just as the
general organization was called the Church as a whole.

The Churches were governed by a Hierarchy. At the
head of one church would be one presiding officer, the
Episkopos, a word of which we have made the English
word “ Bishop.”

He was nominated sometimes, apparently, by the local
clergy ; sometimes by the acclamation of the community.
But he held his title not from these but from Apostolical
succession. He was made a Bishop by the laying on of
hands. Someone of Episcopal rank ordained him, as he
had been ordained. This and that ancient local Church
boasted that it had been founded by an Apostle, and soon
in drawing up lists of Bishops the chain was traced to
that Apostle who had first begun it by the laying on of
hands. Those thus ordained would lay on hands in
their turn, and so the hierarchy or body of the clergy
was formed. After some indeterminate time not the
Bishop alone (who was the full priest) but subordinates
bearing the titles of “ elders,” in the Greek “ pres-
buteroi,” could function at the Holy Mysteries, having
been ordained in their turn by the Bishops. These
consecrated the elements of the Eucharist, and from them
would commonly be drawn the Episcopate. Such was
the original form of the Church. The Ekklesia.

The Ekklesia had a body of writing which it preserved
for the instruction of its members and the continuity of
its doctrine ; but it took a long time before these

38 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

documents were sifted and before a certain proportion of
them (a small portion of the whole) were affirmed to have
special value as Scripture, that is, inspired and therefore
authoritative. There were, for instance, in the way of
records, or pretended records, of Our Lord’s life and
teaching, as we said, some fifty such documents, for
we have fragments of at least that number.

Only four such — now called in English “ Gospels ” —
were after much delay admitted to the Canon, that is,
the “ regular ” or “ official ” collection. In the same
way letters were written by the missionaries of the Early
Church ; but in the same way only a certain number,
under the name of “Epistles,” were admitted to the
Canon, and one record of early Apostolic action, the
Acts of the Apostles ; also one work of prophetic visions,
which we know as the Apocalypse.

This being the sequence whereby the Canon of what
we call today the New Testament was gradually formed
(by selection over a long space of time), it is exceedingly
bad history to pretend that this collection of documents
was the authority for the Faith. The authority for the
Faith was the tradition of the Apostles ; the living
agreement of the faithful, especially as represented by
their heads in the Apostolic succession, the Bishops.*

* Although the word Epuhopo: means literally an overseer, and Presbuterot
meant literally a senior, it is an error to think that this literal meaning was
the original one Episkopos waB a word used with hieratic meaning m the
mystery, Presbuteros the same The function of the Episkopos from the
beginning, at we first find the word used by those who could remember the
Apostles, was always that of a sacred ordained official m the Apostolic succes-
sion. And the other word no more meant old in years than the French word
"Seigneur,” the Spanish "Sefior,” the Italian "Signore,” mean an old man.
These also all derive from the respectful term " senior.” It is thought by
some scholars that in some early cases a college or group of ordained men
governed a particular church rather than an individual. The thing is obscure
and doubtful, but, in any case, clearly exceptional , perhaps an interim
arrangement pending an individual election. Normally each local church has
its own individual Bishop. St. Ignatius of Antioch writes no further from

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 39

Apart from this fundamental institution of the
hierarchy, the sacred caste which alone had spiritual
authority over the Church, there were other elements
which strengthened the new society and helped it to
grow : inter-connective letters, creeds or baptismal
formulas : above all the common Eucharist. There was
the permanent co-ordinating function of the inter-
communication by travel and by correspondence, along
the Imperial roads. All these Churches kept in touch
and maintained a common doctrine alive. Councils of
Bishops were held (at least, after the Emperors had
accepted the Catholic Church, and it had become the
official religion). They would be summoned to represent
the Church throughout the whole world, whence they
derived their title “ oecumenical.”

The first of these, under the first Christian Emperor,
Constantine, was summoned at Nicaea, near Con-
stantinople, because Constantinople had become the
capital of the Empire. It met to discuss and define
the full doctrine of Our Lord’s Divinity, and to reject
heretical ideas connected with it.

The function of getting into communication by travel
and by letter both supported, and was called into being
by, the supreme principle of Unity : The idea that the
Church was one , its doctrine one, its authority one, stood
out vividly in the minds of all its members. From the
beginning dissent was not tolerated ; unity was of the
essence of the thing, and in connection with this there
was present, at first more vaguely, later with greater
definition, the conception of primacy. One of Our
Lord’s Apostles, Peter, was head of the Apostolic College ;
his See had a special, if at first less defined, position in
Christendom ; and Rome, where Peter was last settled,
where he and Paul were martyred, became the permanent
seat of this Primacy as it developed.

The third activity which made for the growing strength
of the Church was the use of what we now call Creeds
(from the Latin word, “ Credo,” “ I believe ”). They
were called in the East where Greek was spoken

4o CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION
“ symbols,” from the Greek “ symbola,” which means
things put together to be agreed on. They were origin-
ally called in the Latin-speaking West, “ Confessiones.”
They arose in order to make sure that a new candidate
for admission to the Ekklesia was not tainted with heresy.
He or she was required before admission to recite truths,
which had been defined in order that such definition
might combat false ideas. These brief recitals did not
pretend to cover the Faith ; they were not a summary
of all, nor even of the principal, beliefs ; for instance,
the great creed of the IVth century made no mention
of the most important and fundamental mystery of the
new society, the Eucharist and the Real Presence of
Christ therein. Of that doctrine there was ample
evidence, going back to the beginning, but as it was not
questioned its definition had never entered into these
rebutting affirmations which the candidate was required
to make. The Church was not and is not based upon
its creeds. The creeds are but the affirmation by the
Church of particular points.

The fourth function making for unity and strength
and permanence and growth was, of course, that very
Eucharist just mentioned. Bread and wine were con-
secrated after a method, and with words, handed down
traditionally as those of Our Lord himself at the Last
Supper. This mystic ceremony was performed by the
celebrant hierarch, or hierarchs ; on its performance the
bread and wine over which the mystical formulae had
been uttered were believed to be no longer bread and
wine but the Body and Blood of Christ Himself.

As St. Justin himself wrote at a time which was to the
Crucifixion as our time is to the Declaration of In-
dependence, and writing as on a matter accepted and long
established, writing moreover for the instruction of
readers who were not Christian, the bread was no longer
“ common bread ” but “ the flesh of Christ.”

All this gives us the external method and machinery
whereby the Faith was established and spread with such
astonishing success throughout a vast society, which had

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM

41

begun by knowing it ill, had proceeded to hate it, and
had at last accepted it for a universal religion.

But what was the internal force ? How were men
convinced ? Why did they join this Society in spite of
the terrible risks communion with it involved ? It
always meant unpopularity. Often it meant ruin of
fortune and thrusting out from the society of one’s
fellows. Sometimes it meant torture and death. What
drove men to it f

The answer is that the Church was a Person which
men came to trust as they come to trust it today by
experience : and having trusted, to love, as they love it
today. A man became a Christian because he found
that the Church affirmed things which he recognized to
be true in experience and holy in character. It was
loved, witnessed to and defended to the death by those
who thus felt it to be, when in contact with it, divine.
The converts of that day, as of ours, discovered the
Church to be the only fixed and certain divine authority
in all their experience. As for doctrine, they took it
from this Society of which they had thus become
enamoured upon such firm grounds of experience. It
was not the Society which proceeded from the doctrine,
but the doctrine that came from the Society.

To understand this last point (which is fundamental
to all comprehension of the Church’s triumph over and
penetration throughout the old Roman world) we must
also understand the character of the violent resistance
which it excited.

That resistance is too often presented in a fashion which
makes it incomprehensible. This is because it is repre-
sented wrongly. People would not have been thrown
to wild beasts, tortured to death, condemned to im-
prisonment with hard labour in the mines, simply
because they preached a general spirit of kindliness, or
worshipped a particular ideal Character. Nothing could
have been more tolerant of variety in opinion than the
old Graeco-Roman Empire. Nor is it true that the
Empire persecuted the Church because it was a secret

4 2 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

society. Mystery societies of various sorts flourished
among the citizens ; why then did an angry instinct for
killing this particular one arise ?

In some degree, no doubt, for that reason which we
find hundreds of years before suggested by a Greek
philosopher filled with vision. He wrote, that if
humanity should come across a perfectly good man, his
fellow men would tear him to pieces. Holiness is a
reproach.

It was also persecuted in some degree perhaps because
its claims ana affirmations upon itself were novel. It
said, as nothing else had yet said, “ I am the voice of
God. You must accept what I say as truth. My code
of morals is the path to eternal beatitude and neglect
or denial of them is the path to eternal despair.” That
was a challenge to all human custom ; a sort of challenge
not easily to be borne.

Allied to this was the hard, the angular quality of the
new thing, with its strict definitions, its Hierarchy, its
highly disciplined organization, standing thus as an alien
body in the midst of a soft diliquescence : solid and with
edges, in the midst of a society that was dissolving. The
Church was an alien thing, and, as it were, indigestible ;
or rather it was something which had to be accepted
altogether or crushed altogether, if there were to be
any peace.

But there was a last political reason and a strong one
for the resistance. As this highly organized, definite,
enthusiastic body spread, it became more and more a
State within the State ; it was a society with its own
authorities, its own discipline and spirit in the midst of
that Imperial World which was inspired by a political
desire for general peace and unity. The Government
of the Empire reacted inevitably and violently against
the presence of such an opponent and challenger. It
has been noted by many that the Emperors best at
government were often the worst persecutors.

This resistance to the spread of the Faith, this com-
pulsion laid upon the Catholic body to fight for its life.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 43

was a chief element in its final triumph. Permanent
work is done in hard material. “ Great sculpture is not
fashioned in butter,” as a just critic said of a minor
poet’s verses. The best carving is done in the closest-
grained wood, and against the grain.

This great united state which included the whole of
the known civilized world, the Graeco-Roman Empire,
fell at first gradually then more rapidly into a material
decline.

All the first century and a half of our era, that is, more
than a century and a half after the pacification and
consolidation of the whole Empire under Augustus, its
first monarch, the material decline was not apparent.
In the earlier part of that period all civilization was at its
height. The influence of Greek art perfected all that
met the outward eye, and literature still inherited the
very high traditions of the Augustan period. The
greatest pagan names in Latin letters and thought
are found before or during the earlier part of those
hundred and odd years.

The outward character of civilization in letters,
as in everything else, in order, policing, law, road-making
and building, remained at a summit. In general, peace
reigned ; although there was occasional fighting between
sections of the regular troops to decide who should be
Commander-in-Chief, and therefore master of the State.
Even on through the second century this order and peace
continued, as did the excellence of material civilization ;
though in some departments, for instance in sculpture
and decoration, there were signs of a baser and more
mechanical spirit appearing. But after about three
generations an appreciable decline appeared ; a manifest
worsening of those things which mark a high civilization.
Literary style fell to a much lower level and continued
to fall ; architecture coarsened ; advance in physical
knowledge halted or went backward.

So long as what are known as the “ Antonine

44 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Emperors ” held power things were well administered
and though civilization was clearly on the downward grade
no one felt the peril and it was not apparent. Many
have said that this “ Antonine Period ” (from a.d. 98 to
a.d. 180) was the most secure and prosperous Europe
had hitherto known, although the arts were certainly
already failing.

But after the Antonines things began to break down.
The last but one of those Emperors, the scholarly but
weak Emperor-philosopher, Marcus Aurelius, the dupe
of his wife, nominated his own son to succeed him.
Hitherto it had been the rule of the Antonine period for
each Emperor to nominate his successor, chosen for his
ability to command soldiers and to govern the State on
its civil side as well. That rule was now broken. Marcus
Aurelius’s son was quite unworthy of his position and his
reign was the approach of a welter in which authority
was weakened. The middle of the third century was
a time in which all manner of upstart soldiers took over
government, each in his own region and over his own
troops ; there was a sort of moral anarchy in which the
prestige of the Imperial Roman Government sank low.

Meanwhile there were recurrent and increasing econ-
omic crises ; money was debased, all the machinery for
trade and production got out of gear. It was clear to
every observer that our civilization had gone down a
great step to a lower level and threatened to sink further
still. The main function of the Army, the saving of the
civilized and wealthy part of Europe from raids by the
half-civilized people beyond the frontiers, was ill con-
ducted; the security of the frontier regions grew less,
the anxiety for their future grew greater.

Order was restored by a Commander-in-Chief called
Aurelian, who might be named the second founder of the
Imperial scheme. But it was most noticeable that even
as he and his immediate successors pursued their task
of setting things to rights again the whole of Society
appeared transformed and transformed for the worse.
Art had quite palpably declined, and literature with it.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 45

The Empire during the worst of its trouble had shown
great powers of survival; Europe remained coherent,
the Graeco-Roman culture, though it had been degraded,
did not perish. The raids of pirates upon the coast and
of marauding bands over the frontiers were not allowed
to inflict damage beyond a certain measure ; our civiliza-
tion, lowered though it was in intellectual and aesthetic
tone, still seemed secure and immutable.

None the less decline continued. At the end of the
third century a very remarkable soldier and administrator,
the Emperor Diocletian, attempted a reorganization of
the whole State and many of the divisions he laid down
lasted for centuries. The provinces which he defined
remained marked by the same limits right on until the
Middle Ages and many of them much later still. In a
number of cases our ecclesiastical dioceses corresponded
for centuries to these divisions.

The framework of the Empire stood ; its coinage, its
laws, all its life moved on without a break. There was
no “ Fall of the Roman Empire ” — the phrase is rhetorical
and false ; but there was a slow Social Revolution ; a
profound change transforming the texture of Society.
The half-civilized tribes on the fringes of the Empire
filtered more and more into Graeco-Roman society,
acquired more power and introduced elements of dis-
order ; the ruling class changed and largely lost its
culture.

On the material side of life all seemed to be sinking
slowly, even while on the spiritual side there was rising
to triumph the mighty force of the Catholic Church.

Now since the rise of the one spiritual thing and the fall
of the other material thing were coincident, may not they
be related as cause and effect ?

This is the capital question which we have to deal with
on approaching the decline of the Roman Empire in
material things.

The answer was given without hesitation by the
scholars of the Renaissance who rediscovered the glories
of pagan antiquity and themselves became half pagan in

4 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

spirit. They often said, they always implied, that what
ruined the material civilization of the old Graeco-Roman
Empire, that glorious pagan civilization of the statues and
the colonnades, the high verse and the high philosophy,
was the spread of a superstition, of something degrading :
the spread, I repeat, of that which those who do not
know the Faith call “ Christianity,” but which those
who know the Faith call by its right name, the Catholic
Church.

While the Empire was changing under the growing
influence of the Church, contemporary witnesses said
exactly the same thing. The chronicler of the pagan
reaction under Julian the Apostate, half a lifetime after
the victory of Constantine, wrote, “ The Christians, to
whom we owe all our misfortunes. ...”

That the enemies of the Church or those who knew
the Church imperfectly or those who, like the scholars
of the Renaissance, were in reaction against the Church,
should have spoken thus, is comprehensible. Much more
remarkable is the fact that the defenders of the Church,
in the last four hundred years, have re-echoed that same
complaint though in a different form.

“ Yes,” they say, “ material civilization did decline as
the Empire turned Christian ; the Dark Ages did coincide
with the triumph of the Faith. But why ? Because
men’s minds were naturally turned, during the disasters
of human society, to the consolation of Divine things.
What matter if somewhat less attention were paid to
art and letters and if the stuff of Society coarsened, so
long as a spiritual advantage of supreme value was
gaining ground all the time ? ”

That sort of attitude went on until past the middle
of the XIXth century. The enemies of the Faith making
certain that history proved this breakdown of civilization
to be due to the spread of Oriental superstitions, especially
the superstition of the “ Ekklesia.” The Catholics often
reluctantly admitted the same thesis — they who should
have known better. They excused the coincidence
between the Catholic victory and decay in architecture.

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 47

sculpture, history, verse and the rest, by saying that it
did not matter since at last Divine things had come down
to men. The price, they said, was worth the paying.

But the truth of the business, which people only began
to recover within living memory (because only within
living memory has history been fully examined and
scientifically treated) is almost the opposite of what had
been said so long. It was not the spread of the Faith which
undermined the high civilization of pagan antiquity ; on
the contrary, the Faith saved all that could be saved ; and,
but for the conversion of the Roman Empire, nothing of
our culture would have remained.

The truth had already been put in one sentence by
St. Jerome when he said that if the Graeco-Roman
world had accepted the Catholic Church in time the
decay of civilization would never have taken place.

The dates are sufficient proof in this matter. The old
pagan civilization was in active decay long before the
new, small and struggling obscure group of Catholic
congregations began to have any appreciable effect. The
golden age of literature was passed, letters had become
sterile, architecture coarsened, long before the Ekklesia
was felt to be a menacing force to the natural Paganism
of the Old World. Already old age, corruption, greed,
the preponderance of slaves and “ Freed-men ”* side by
side with the growth of vast fortunes overshadowing
Society and throwing it out of balance, had long been
at work when the Catholic Church was still so insignificant
that it is hardly mentioned by the mass of contemporary
writers. There are one or two allusions here and there
which have reference to this body, but no more. Only
when the Empire was already almost broken down, in
the Illrd century, does the Church begin to make a
strong appeal ; and even then its members were as yet
but a small minority even in the East. They were a still
smaller minority in the West.

* A" Freed-man ” was a slave whom his master had emancipated, but who
still owed devotion and service.

So CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Constantinople and the East still stood), wide districts
came to be governed by local Generals, who commanded
soldiers recruited from the less civilized border clans. The
authority of the Emperor was still recognized, though
actual administrative power in Gaul and Italy and Spain
and North Africa passed into the hands of the focal
troops and their chieftains, few in number, and for the
most part Slav and Germanic. But be it remembered
that these also were mainly Christians and that for all of
them the Empire represented the only civilization they
knew, the only possible civilization, though they had
unwittingly degraded it.

This change in the Army, this breakdown of Imperial
local government in the West and the taking of it over
by the commanders of garrisons often half-barbaric was
a contributory cause to the sliding down of our civilization
into the Dark Ages ; but it was not the main cause.
The main cause was that despair and senility into which
the old pagan civilization had fallen long before. In
such a pass the Church alone had power to revivify and
in part to preserve.

Lastly, let it be remembered that though we must for
the purpose? of right history admit the continual material
decline going on through those first five centuries during
which the Empire turned from Pagan to Christian, the
new religion brought with it invaluable compensations
for evils which it had not caused but at the advance of
which it had been present.

The Catholic Church brought back to the old ruined,
dying, despairing Graeco-Roman world the quality of
vision. It brought back a motive for living and thence
there came to it, sustaining all that could be sustained of
that grievously weakened world, the seeds of what were
to become saner and more stable social arrangements.

The Catholic Church having become the religion of
Graeco-Roman society did, among other things, two
capital things for the settlement of Europe on its political
side, and for arresting the descent into chaos. It
humanized slavery and it strengthened permanent

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 51

marriage. Very slowly through the centuries those two
influences were to produce the stable civilization of the
Middle Ages, wherein the slave was no longer a slave but
a peasant ; and everywhere the family was the well-rooted
and established unit of Society.

The old pagan world had reposed as we have seen upon
slavery ; the great bulk of its human material was made
up of slaves — perhaps two-thirds, perhaps more. The
Catholic Church had grown up in that state of affairs ;
its members in the early centuries could conceive no
other.

The Church never denied the right to own slaves, but
it was the spirit of the Church which gradually trans-
formed their condition. It became difficult, often
impossible, to deal with a baptized Christian man as a
chattel ; emancipation was fostered as a high act of
charity. Under the first Christian Emperors the laws
regulating the relations between slave and master grew
continually more human.

Nevertheless, slavery continued throughout these first
five centuries, wherein Christendom was founded, to be
the accepted basis of all Society. The typical social unit
was the village estate belonging to one man, containing
a certain number of free men and recently emancipated
men, but dependent for its field work on slave labour.
A class of proprietors, some of them immensely wealthy,
continued to direct society and their incomes came from
the difference between the costs of maintaining the
slaves and the value of the food and clothing, etc. which
the slaves produced.

There were indeed free craftsmen also, especially in
the towns, and all the rapidly growing clerical body,
priests, and the several orders of lesser clergy, later the
monks, were necessarily free men. So, of course, were
the officials, the tax-collectors, the surveyors, the people
about the courts of justice, the retired soldiers, and the
bodies of regular troops and auxiliary troops as well. But
the bulk of society, now Christian, was built up of slaves :
slaves married, slaves mainly agricultural and living in

52 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

fixed homes from one generation to another, but none the
less slaves.

Meanwhile the political machinery of society went
through no apparent revolution, though it got more and
more inefficient.

Taxes were still gathered on the age-long established
territorial assessments and in the immemorial way,
though decreasing revenues resulted. The sums paid on
arable and pasture and forests, on bridge-tolls and market
dues, and the rest, were paid in largely to the local govern-
ments and largely ceased in the West to reach the central
Imperial Treasury by the end of the Vth century. The
law courts continued to function, the coinage was still
struck in the Emperor’s name and effigy, men still thought
of themselves as Roman citizens. The monarch at
Constantinople was the admitted head of all Christendom,
his direct rule was felt everywhere east of the Adriatic
and intermittently in North Africa, Spain and Gaul,
though his direct rule there weakened and ceased. It
was rapidly replaced by the local chieftains who
commanded the garrisons, mainly of what were called
“ federated troops,” that is, men of barbarian origin
incorporated with the Roman service.

Of such were the tribal chieftains of the Burgundians,
of the Gothic bodies, of the Vandals and of the various
Frankish groups. Of these last, one small body was
commanded from Tournai and at the end of the
Vth century the young General commanding it, Clovis,
became Catholic, whereas the other Generals remained
heretical. His conversion made him much the most
powerful ruler in the West, head of nearly all Gaul.

Nor is it true that intellectual activity failed as,
towards a.d. 500, we entered the Dark Ages. What
happened was that it changed its interests. There was
a vast mass of writing, of eager disputation, but such
discussion no longer turned on doubtful, insoluble
problems, an end to which was not expected or desired —
it dealt with certitude, with an ardent establishment of
what it held to be the all-satisfying truth, the Faith, the

FOUNDATION OF CHRISTENDOM 53

salvation of mankind and the defence of that truth against
attack from without and from within.

It has been till lately the fashion to deride the writings
of the Fathers and theological interest of the IVth and
Vth centuries as foolish. In the English language this
fashion is identified with the name of Gibbon, who drew
all his inspiration and copied all his data from the anti-
Catholic French writers of his day. But the Fathers, and
indeed all those who took part in the vivid theological
discussion which runs for generations through Europe,
were at once conservative and creative ; their intellectual
energy saved us ; their powers of definition and of appre-
ciation are at the root of the culture which nourished
Europe through the difficulties of the coming time — those
centuries to which we shall next turn under the title of
the “ Siege of Christendom.”

To sum up, then, by the end of that long period, the
first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to
the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic
Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our
ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during
which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which
we suffered grave damage : disorder, the fall of the arts,
of great verse and of high unified administration, the
worsening of roads, much loss of the knowledge inherited
from the past (Greek, for instance was dying out in the
West and legend was more and more intermixed with
real history). But Europe in that period became
spiritually consolidated so that it proved able to meet
and overcome the strain to which it was about to be
subjected.

The conversion of the Graeco-Roman world to Catho-
licism gave that world a unity which it had never had
before and which preserved it.

That strain would have come anyhow, the violent
attack under which Europe nearly broke down, “ The
Siege of Christendom,” was inevitable. But we survived
it. Had it not been for the Conversion of our world we
should have gone under.

II

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED

w

THE SIEGE OF CHRISTENDOM : A.D. 50O TO A.D. IOOO

IN the formation of Christendom, its economic and
social structure, under the influence of the Catholic
Church, the next period after the first foundational one
(of five hundred years) is another, also roughly of five
hundred years : from approximately the year 500 to
about the year 1000.

It is a period of five centuries — the Vlth, Vllth,
VUIth, IXth and Xth — which have commonly been
called the “ Dari Ages,” but which may more properly
be called “ The Siege of Christendom.” It was the
period during which the Graeco-Roman Empire, already
transformed by Catholicism, fell into peril of destruction
at the hands of exterior enemies. This vast and pro-
longed attack was quite different from the earlier period
of what are wrongly called “ the Barbarian invasions.”
The Goths and Franks and Vandals were not distinct
from the Empire. They were federated troops of the
Empire and belonged to the Imperial religion. They
were Christians. They did not enter as enemies from
without, but lived within the boundaries. But these
later attacks were of another sort altogether. The sea
rovers came over the water from the north-east
determined only on loot and eager to pull down the
Roman world : Asiatics also came in through the great
plains and attacked on the east — all these true barbaric
invasions in the heart of the Dark Ages which rose to their
worst in the IXth century attempted to trample our
inheritance, burn our shrines, destroy the Mass and
extirpate the Christian name.

We were assaulted from the north, from the east, and
from the south-east in two separate fashions. Hordes of
57

58 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

wholly pagan barbarians, some issuing from Scandinavia,
many Mongols, many Slavs, fiercely thrust at the
boundaries of Christendom with the hope of looting it
as their prey and therefore ruining it. These between
them formed the eastern attach, coming from the districts
we call today Sweden and Norway and Denmark, Poland
and the Russian plains, Hungary and the Danube valley.

Our struggle against these enemies of the Christian
name and culture, who so nearly overwhelmed us, was
at last successful. The siege was raised. We carried the
influence of civilization outward among those who had
been our savage opponents, and we ended by taming
them all until they were incorporated into a new and
expanded Christian civilization. That was the work of
the Christian Church in the West, the Church under the
direct authority of the Western Patriarch at Rome (who
is also universal primate) and of the Latin liturgy.

What happened on the south-east was a separate and
distinct thing.

There , that is, against the Greek-speaking part of the
Empire, directly ruled from Constantinople, the peril
took the strange form of a sudden enthusiastic movement,
which was both religious and military. It took the form
of a swarm of light desert cavalry riding out from the
sands of Arabia and swooping down on Greek-speaking
and Greek-administered civilizations, Syria (including
Palestine) and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and then from
Egypt, following up all along the southern shores of the
Mediterranean between the sea and the Sahara. It
reached the Atlantic itself in Morocco, crossed the Straits
of Gibraltar, and passed northward, overran Spain and
even crossed the Pyrenees. To these mountains it was
beaten back after its first northern extreme had been
reached in the middle of France. This attack from the
south-east was the Mohammedan attack, not pagan as
was the other to the north, not savage, but, from the
beginning, incorporating in its conquest all the elements
of civilization, developing a high literature of its own, and
turning at last from a heresy, which it was in its

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 59

beginnings, to what was virtually a new religion and a
new type of society — Islam.

This south-eastern attach upon Christendom not only
held its own but progressed with the centuries. It was
indeed somewhat thrust back in Spain after many
generations had passed, but it continued fixed and strong
all over North Africa and Syria ; it ultimately swamped
Constantinople itself, and, in quite modern times.
Islam threatened the capture of Vienna and therewith
the overwhelming of Christian Germany.

Let us look at this “ Siege of Christendom ” in some-
what more detail.

First, as to the northern and eastern attack : it was an
attack from Scandinavia and the Baltic. It was essentially
an attack by pirates few in number but very dangerous
on account of their mobility and their fierce onslaught
upon a decaying society ; a society moreover, wherein
the most of men were in servitude and could not be
mobilized to defend the State, and where local govern-
ments were ill able to support each other on account of
decay in the general organization, and central forces, of
society. These pirate attacks had had a preliminary sort
of rehearsal in the shape of what are loosely called the
Saxon invasions of Britain, but what are really mixed
pirate raids proceeding from the North Sea coast
immediately upon the north-eastern limits of the Empire :
the mouths of the Ems, the Weser, and the Elbe, and the
shores of the Bight of Heligoland — that is, the Frisian
western shores of what we call today Schleswig-Holstein.

The story that they overran Britain, drove out the
original British inhabitants, and resettled the island, is
nonsense ; but what is true is that, in the general break-
down of Roman administration, local heads of pirate
bands took over local government along a narrow belt
by the eastern and south-eastern shores of what is today
called England. It was this group that was known by

60 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the general term “ Saxon,” and that raided the shores
around Calais and Boulogne and south-eastern Belgium
as well as the island of Britain. It is interesting to note
that one portion of the pirate groups were called
“ Angles ” or “ Engles,” from which we get our modem
words “ English ” and “ England.” The word pre-
sumably arose from the Latin word “ angulus,” which
meant, among other things, a Bight, and would apply
to the Bight of Heligoland. As so often happens, the
savages took on their name from an appellation which
civilization had given them.

These preliminary attacks from oversea by pirates
began very early, indeed they began long before the
breakdown of Roman administration. They were already
recurrent and fairly severe in the century before
Constantine, and kept on getting worse and worse up to
the year 500. They had the effect of cutting off what
was still Christian Britain from the Continent and
therefore causing society in the island to sink yet lower.

When the energy of these first pirate raids that crossed
the North Sea was exhausted, the Pope of the day sent
out missionaries to convert the eastern belt of Britain
where civilization had largely disappeared with the
Christian religion upon whidi it depended. The Pope’s
emissary, St. Augustine, and his companions, came over
from fully Christian France just before the year 600, and
before the end of the following century they had re-
established the Mass, and writing, and proper building,
and civilization in general throughout that eastern belt
of Britain which the raids had half ruined.

To this success of theirs attached a very interesting
consequence : they had sought, for the conversion of the
barbaric eastern strip of Britain, the aid of the still
Christian, though impoverished and degraded, west of
Britain ; but the Christian kinglets and Bishops of west
Britain refused to help the Italian missionaries, perhaps
because they feared foreign domination. The result was
that the Church, which was then altogether the most
important, indeed the only, large organization of the

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 61

day, with all the strength that modem Capitalism has
in half-developed countries of our own time, threw its
weight in favour of the little chieftains on the east coast
of Britain against those of the west.

Ireland was already Catholic through a process of
conversion which had begun from the Christian side of
Britain two hundred years before. Irish missionaries
did, indeed, precede the Roman effort at converting
the barbarized strip of Eastern Britain, but they did not
agree with the general customs of the Latin Church,
especially in the observance of Easter. In a council held
at Whitby on the coast of Yorkshire, the arguments for
conformity with the Roman usages prevailed, and the
full union of the Church in Britain with the Latin or
Western Church on the Continent was ultimately
accomplished.

It was the language, therefore, of the petty courts in
York and in Bamburgh on the coast of the North Sea
and in Norfolk and in Suffolk, Essex and Kent, that was
spread through the missionary schools and through the
Church’s effort, as civilization was slowly re-established
westward throughout the middle of the island. That is
why England and its expansion speaks English today, a
language half Latin and half Teutonic, instead of speaking
a language half Latin and half Celtic.

With Britain thus recovered for the imperilled Catholic
civilization of Western Europe, there was a lull lasting
about a hundred years so far as pirate expeditions over-
seas against Christendom were concerned. The heavy
fighting of the day was done against the savage Germans
of the continent and the Mongols coming up the Danube
valley and the plains to the north of it. That was the
moment when Western civilization was gathered into one
state under the chief ruler of Gaul, King Charles, who
was crowned Emperor of the West at Rome in the year
800 and is called in history Charlemagne.

There were indeed bad raids by Scandinavian pirates,
though no actual invasion until after Charlemagne’s
death in 814. But during the succeeding century and

62 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

more, the pirate attacks increased in vigour and the pirates
began to make settlements in the island of Britain and on
the coasts of northern and western France and on the
banks of the rivers in both countries. This second wave of
murderous piracy came from the southern part of what
we call today Norway and Sweden and the peninsula of
Denmark. The pirates were known in England as Danes
and on the continent as the “ men from the north,” or
Northmen, which was contracted into Normans. As
with the first wave of pirates, they were not numerous —
a boat held on the average not more than fifty fighting
men and all their vessels combined came only to a few.*

These pirates who came across and down the North
Sea raided England continuously and northern France as
well. In northern France their chief, a certain Rollo,
was accepted by the Christian Empire, as so many of
his kind had been in the past. He was allowed to take
over local government, his fighting men and their
followers intermarried with the land-owning families
and their freemen on the lower Seine, and a new local
chief took over the government of the province then
called the Second Lyonnese, but now called Normandy.
He ruled from Rouen, and, of course, the few thousand
Scandinavians soon melted into the general Gallo-Roman
population, spoke the same language, northern French,
the ancestor of modern French. These few invaders
were rapidly digested into the mass of civilization.!

The pirate invasions of northern Gaul thus ceased a long
lifetime before the year 1000. They went on against
England much longer, and England as a province of
Roman civilization was almost overwhelmed by their

* The largest single attack was that made on the new Christian settlements
at the mouth of the Elbe, where Charlemagne had forced the German pagans
to become civilized, baptizing them under pam of death. It is to be
remembered that this great attack on Hamburg failed

t We often come across in modern books written m the English tongue the
term " Norman French ” There never was an y such tongue as Norman French.
The Duke of Normandy and his nobles and squires and all the people of the
province spoke the same French as was spoken from the Loire to the Channel
and from the Ardennes to the boundaries of Breton speech.

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 63

destructive efforts. But the Christian people of the
island rallied under Alfred and his successors and even
while they suffered the blows of the pirates, succeeded
in converting them and half civilizing them. At last,
just after the year 1000, the raids of the Scandinavian
pirate kings against England turned into a dynastic
movement. They were already half Christian at home
as well as abroad. But they kept up a foreign, half-pagan
pressure against the English, which did not end until
the Duke of Normandy with a large French-speaking
army and many mercenaries from northern France came
over and founded medieval England in 1066.

One may say that on this sector, the north-eastern
sector, the siege of Christendom was definitely raised.
So it was on the mid-eastern sector. Pagan Mongol
raids of light cavalry, even more murderous and de-
structive than the Scandinavian pirates, were checked
by the now Christian Germans of the Rhine and the
lower Elbe and the upper Danube. The furthest outpost
of the Mongol raiders had gone as far west as the river
Saone in France. They reached the town of Tournus,
today on the main railway line between Paris and
Marseilles. But long before the year 1000 they had
ebbed back to the plains of Hungary, a country which
takes its name and its language from Mongol sources.

So much for the pagan raiders from Scandinavia.
Further east were the Slavonic raiders.

The Slavs came down in confused, unco-ordinated
tribes called by various names, and thrusting from the
great northern plains down into the Balkans. There
they harried the Greek Empire, but Constantinople
always stood up to them and retained fluctuating power
in the highlands of what we call today Jugoslavia and
Bulgaria. The Slavs also were converted, but converted
by Greek influence.

In this mass conversion of the Slavs by Byzantine
missionaries, one exception arose : that northern group
of them who later were called Poles received the western
influence coming from Germany; they dropped the

64 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Greek liturgy and adopted the Latin. When the
separation between the Eastern and Western Churches
became more distinct, the Poles represented the Western
or Latin civilization in the Slav world.

We have seen that the siege of Christendom on its
south-eastern sector, that is, from Asia Minor to Syria,
and Egypt, was of a quite different character from what
it was in the north and centre of Europe. We have seen
that in the north and centre it was an attack of savages
by sea and land, without culture, letters or any system
of government worthy of the name. The pressure was
very heavy and lasted a long time, but the siege was
raised, the attack was beaten back and Christendom itself
triumphantly advanced over the populations and into
the territories which had been those of the enemy.

To the south, however, on the eastern end of the
Mediterranean, the siege of Christendom by its enemies
was successful. It was never raised.

It was undertaken at first by very small numbers but
under the inspiration of a religious zeal — Mohammedan-
ism— and with the exceptional opportunity they had, the
attackers took over that part of Christendom, the Greek
part, which they attacked. They took over its culture,
its arts, its building, its general social structure, its land
survey (on which the taxes were based) and all the rest
of it. But the attackers imposed their new heresy which
gradually became a new religion and which held power
over government and society wherever the attack broke
our eastern siege-line and occupied Christian territory.
The result was a complete transformation of society which
rapidly grew into a violent contrast between the Orient
and Europe. Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not
only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and
even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia
eastward.

The opportunity for the attack on this sector was
exceptional. The high Greek civilization centralized in
Constantinople and its wealthy Imperial Court defended

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 65

by a highly trained professional army, possessing great
revenues as well, might have seemed, at first sight, far
better able to resist assaults than was Western Europe,
with its conditions already half barbaric through the long
material decline, with its lack of regular armies and its
division into half independent local groups. But as a
fact the blow delivered against the Greeks, the Christen-
dom of the south-east, cracked the shell and had more
immediate and more profound consequences than the
mere hordes of the east and north.

The opportunities given for the attack from the south-
east were fourfold. First, debt to moneylenders was
universal (as it is with us today) ; secondly, taxes were
very heavy ; thirdly, a large proportion of the population
were slaves ; fourthly, both law and theology, that is,
both social practice and religious rules, had become more
complex than the masses could follow.

A new reforming enthusiasm invading the Empire
could take advantage of all these four weaknesses : it
could promise the indebted farmer, the indebted
municipal authority, the wiping out of their debts ; it
could promise the heavily burdened small taxpayer relief
from his burdens ; it could promise freedom to the
slave and it could promise a simple — a far too simple —
new set of rules for Society and new set of practices in
religion. It was this fourth appeal, the appeal to
simplification, especially to simplification of religion and
morals, which had the greatest force. It worked in
Syria and Egypt at that moment just as it worked nine
centuries later in the West during the Reformation.

This intense enthusiasm for reform arose almost wholly
from the personal driving-power of one man, an Arab
camel driver called Mohammed. Like all the Arabs
around him in that desert region outside the jurisdiction
of the Christian Empire under Constantinople, he was
bom a pagan. But having wandered far afield he was
deeply stirred by the religious systems, Christian and
Jewish, which he came across in the civilized world.
Certain main tenets appealed to him intensely; he

66 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

summed them up in a body of doctrine which remained
his own. He became passionately attached to the
Catholic doctrine of a personal omnipotent God, the
creator of all things, to His justice and His mercy, to the
corresponding double fate of mankind, Heaven or Hell, to
the reality of a world of good, as well as of evil, spirits,
to the resurrection and immortality of human beings.
All this group of simple fundamental Catholic doctrine
he not only accepted but was permeated by. He was
struck with awe at the contemplation of Christ and
regarded Our Lord as the very first of moral teachers
and renovators of the spiritual life. And he paid deep
veneration to Our Lady.

But a priesthood (which to his mind was a useless
social complexity), the whole sacramental system which
went with a priesthood, and that central essential pillar
of Christendom, the Mass, he rejected altogether. He
also rejected baptism, retaining or accepting circumcision
not only as a Jewish rite, but as common among his own
people. He allowed a relaxed sexual morality, con-
cubinage and a plurality of legitimate wives, as also very
easy divorce.

We must presume that this powerful zealot was sincere,
that he felt vouchsafed within him a divine revelation
and a mission to spread it by his burning enthusiasm. He
felt himself to be in the line of the greater prophets, the
last and the greatest of them all. There may have been
an element of the charlatan and deceiver about him, as
his enemies believed and as many modem scholars and
historians still incline to believe in part. But for the
main, for his sense of his mission and his claim to be the
supreme prophet of God, we must believe that he was
sincere. At any rate the band of men whom he con-
vinced and gathered around him, established the new
heresy (for it was essentially a Christian heresy at first,
though arising just outside the boundaries of Christen-
dom) ; fiercely propagated it by arms — a method which
strongly appealed to the Arab temper. The seed took
vigorous root and shortly after Mohammed’s death the

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 67

band of mounted warriors, burning to spread the intense
doctrine he had framed for them, burst through the
confines of civilization where the desert meets the
cultivated land east of Jordan.

Their success was amazing. They took Damascus,
which is the key of all the Near East, and in the valley
of the Yarmuk they defeated the regular Christian
Byzantine Army sent against them, though it vastly
exceeded them in numbers. They swept over Syria and
Mesopotamia, organizing their new power everywhere,
offering freedom to the slaves and the debtors, and relief
to the taxpayer wherever these would accept the religion
of Mohammed. And the simplicity of that religion
powerfully aided their effort. Men desiring freedom
from thraldom and from debt and from the weight of
the taxes, joined them everywhere in great numbers.
There arose a governing Mohammedan nucleus which
alone had armed power and which vastly exceeded in
numbers the original cavalcade that had set out from
the Arabian sands. The great majority of the population
remained, of course, still attached more or less directly
to their Catholic traditions or those of their local heresies ;
their practices in liturgy were tolerated by their new
masters, but they no longer had any political power and
all the armament was in the hands of those who were
now their superiors.

This system of Mohammedan government over great
regions of Christian culture spread with startling rapidity ;
it swamped Egypt, using henceforward the revenues of
its great wealth in the Delta and the Valley of the Nile.
It passed over and dominated the Greek-speaking, Punic-
speaking and Latin-speaking cities of the North African
shore lying between the Mediterranean and the desert.
The triumphant invasion did not cease even when it had
reached the Atlantic. It crossed the Straits of Gibraltar,
it overran the Spanish peninsula, it crossed the Pyrenees
and attempted to do to Western Christendom what it
had done to Eastern.

The great wave broke when its crest had reached the

68 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

centre of Gaul. In a vast battle fought half-way between
Tours and Poitiers the Christians, under the leadership
of one of the wealthiest and greatest of the Gallo-Roman
families mixed with German blood — the family from
which Charlemagne was to come — threw back the in-
vasion to the Pyrenees. But beyond the Pyrenees this
strange new Arabian thing, though but a minority in
numbers, was supreme over government and arms.

The pace of that expansion was so astonishing as to
be still claimed by the Mohammedans as miraculous and
as the proof of their prophet’s divine mission. The
original battle of the Yarmuk when the first Byzantine
army had been astonished into sudden defeat at the hands
of quite unexpected foes, took place in 634. The battle
between Toms and Poitiers in the heart of France was
fought in 732. Not a hundred years, little more than
one long lifetime, had sufficed for this prodigious ex-
pansion.

The siege of Christendom on this side, to the south-
east and the south, had indeed succeeded : save in Spain
itself, it was never raised. On the contrary, the pressure
against Christendom in the east was to remain continuous
and at last to threaten all our civilization again. The
Mohammedan was at the gates of Vienna less than a
hundred years before the Declaration of Independence.
Had he taken Vienna he would have reached the Rhine.

Such had been what I have called “ The Siege of
Christendom ” ; the VUIth, IXth and Xth centuries
to which more properly than any other — but especially
to the mid-IXth and the greater part of the Xth —
may be applied to the term “ Dark Ages.”

These generations of peril, continual fighting against
external enemies and uninterrupted struggle had upon
our mortally-threatened civilization an effect of the
greatest import for our future. That effect may be
called by metaphor “ annealing.” The pressure and
heat of the struggle confirmed Christian Europe in the

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 69

mould wherein it had been cast. It consolidated our
society, and gave it that form which was to prove vigorous
and enduring and provide the “ taking-off place ” for
the great expansion of the true Middle Ages about to
follow.

What had the social structure of Christendom become
during those three centuries of unceasing defensive
combat ? In the first place the internal social structure
of the West had consolidated and taken on a new and
enduring character.

Slavery properly so-called, the buying and selling of
men and women and exploitation of their labour by mere
force, had ceased to be the foundation of Society. In its
place there had developed a state of affairs in which
the former slave had become the Serf. The descendants
of the slaves were no longer working at the arbitrary
will of masters here and there upon the great landed
estates ; they were fixed in village communities over
which the former owner remained master, but a master
with rights now strictly limited by custom.

The serf was the half-way house between the Slave of
pagan antiquity and the Free Peasant of the later
Christian centuries. The great bulk — at least nine-tenths
— of Christian men in the West were agricultural. In
the German-speaking belt of the Rhine valleys and its
margin immediately to the east, in the equally German
districts of the upper Danube, in Gaul (or France),
Britain, Italy and that part of Spain towards the north
which had been recovered by Christian armies from the
Mohammedan, at least nine families out of ten were tilling
the earth, and of these some large majority, perhaps
two-thirds, were serfs attaching to the soil, still compelled
to work, as their slave forefathers had been, for other
men, acting as bondsmen to lords, but their work strictly
limited by what had become immemorial custom. So
many days a week the serf had to give to the lord’s own
farmland, but the rest of his time was his own. Of the
produce of his own land, so much he had to give in
dues to the Church and the local lord ; but the rest

70 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

was, in practice, at his own disposal. In other words,
the isolation of the villages during the long wars of the
siege of Christendom, the very fact that intercommunica-
tion had become difficult, produced a self-sufficing and
fully organized village community.

Now there was one force which had thus already half
emancipated the old slave class, and given it gradually
throughout the centuries the higher position it had
achieved : and that force was the religion common to
lord and slave alike. All men felt themselves, under the
challenge of the outer barbarism, to be of one Christian
stuff : one united and superior civilization which had to
remain alive through its own energy.

It has often been said that the gradual evolution
during the Dark Ages of the slave into the half-free serf,
his progress on the way to becoming a free peasant, was
a blind economic development. It was the fashion of
the XIXth century to talk in this way, because the funda-
mental XIXth century error was materialism, and
materialistic philosophy, being false, led men into
false history.

There was no economic reason for the decay of the old
servitude and the increase of personal position and free-
dom in what had become the mass of the unfree. It is
Mind which determines the change of Society, and it
was because the mind at work was a Catholic mind that
the slave became a serf and was on his way to becoming
a peasant and a fully free man — a man free economically
as well as politically. The whole spirit of the Church
was for small property, and that spirit was slowly,
instinctively, working for the establishment of small
property throughout Christendom. It was small
property subject to servitudes, paying heavy dues to
others ; but it was small property just the same, and it
had struck permanent root.

Corresponding to this development in the agricultural
world which formed nine-tenths of that society, was the
development in the world of craftsmen and artisans and
the life of the towns. There the Guild, binding groups

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 71

of craftsmen together, limiting competition, fostering a
corporate life, mirrored the arrangements of the village.
The rules of the Christian Guild, and still more of its
spirit, forbade the accumulation of wealth in a few hands
— the eating up of the small man by the great. The work
of the apprentice was indeed subject to exploitation by
his master, but the apprentice became of right a master
in his turn, and the carpenters, masons, clothiers and the
rest at the end of the Dark Ages were thus organized
throughout Christendom in self-sufficing and self-
governing bodies, bound together by traditions not yet
explicit as they later became, not yet generally codified
as they later were, but of living force to preserve the
proper livelihood of Christian men.*

Such was the effect of that process of “ annealing ”
upon the agricultural mass of Society, which included,
be it remembered, not only the descendants of the old
slaves but the smaller free farmers as well. And such
was its effect upon the craftsmen of the towns, and all
those of the common people who lived otherwise than
by tillage. There remained patches of actual servile
condition ; there were cases still of men bought and sold,
but they were highly exceptional and the exceptions
soon died out.

The dues paid and the services rendered according to
a fixed custom by the village communities to their lords
supported those village lords in a class of their own ; and
sundry other dues also supported another caste of Society
— the clergy. The mass of feudal lords were small lords
of one village or two or three at the most ; and an
intermediate class had acquired through marriage and
inheritance groups of villages, rendering them more
wealthy, whale well above these were the few great
regional fortunes which took dues from and governed
whole districts.

* The aeedi of the European Guild were sown much earlier. The Guild
ii Roman and there are parallels to it, of course, all over the world and m all
ages. Nevertheless m its strongest and best form it is essentially an institution
of the Middle Ages.

72 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

These districts again were grouped loosely and by
personal ties into kingships. The feudal class of lords,
from the small village lord to the largest holders, had
become now for generations since the siege of Christen-
dom, not only politically the governing class but the
fighting class of Society. Theirs was the business of
defence and of expanding the territory of Christendom.

The society of Christendom undergoing its slow
transformation during the pressure of this great “ siege,”
as I have called it, developed three characteristics which
stamped themselves upon the European nature till long
after the siege-conaitions had disappeared. They
remained stamped upon the form of Europe till the
Renaissance and beyond. We still have relics of them
today.

The first of these characteristics was a profound
underlying sense of Christian unity and particularly of
Western Christian unity : the unity of all those bound
together by the Latin Mass and by the Western
Patriarchate, at the head of which was the Bishop of
Rome, the Pope.

The military power of the pagan Roman Empire had
never achieved a moral unity of this kind. It had
imposed a political unity and a certain pride in citizen-
ship, but it did not provide that spiritual bond without
which a society can never be really one. Today we think
of unity in terms of independent states and races. Some
are even so superficial as to think of unity in terms of a
common language. But the prime factor of unity in any
society, large or small, is for all the members of that
society to hold the same philosophy, to put human affairs
in the same order of importance, and to be agreed on the
prime matters of right and wrong and of public worship.

The second characteristic of the siege was the develop-
ment of a noble caste. There arose in men’s minds the
conception of “ blood ” : a sort of mystical distinction
betweer one kind of descent and another.

Men nave debated the origins of this strong feeling
and usually come to erroneous conclusions thereon.

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 73

There has, of course, been the non-rational or mystical
conception of caste in any number of human societies
from the remotest past. Sometimes these may have
arisen from conquest, but more commonly from venera-
tion for superiors. At some date before recorded history
a religious feeling led to the worship of a particular clan
or section of the community. There were even among
the outer Germans, who had on this, as in most things,
ideas less precise than their neighbours to the south and
west, feelings that this or that family was sacred, so that
the chieftain of the tribe could be taken from that family
and no other. Such an arrangement can be found in
others of the half-civilized outer fringe beyond the strict
boundaries of the old Roman Empire.

But the feeling of rank which developed in Christendom
during the Dark Ages and took very firm root had another
source. It proceeded from leadership in war. The
leaders of the loosely organized Christian forces which
withstood the pressure of anti-Christian barbarism on
the north and Mohammedan hatred on the south, were
in the main the descendants of the old Roman land-
owners, the possessors of the great country estates tilled
by their slaves. These were the one wealthy and
dominating class at the end of the direct government
of the West from Rome. They became the natural
chiefs of the bands drawn from their freemen and armed
at their expense. These bands were levied either for
local defence against the pagan invasions or for private
war or for the formation of great hosts when such an
agglomeration was necessary to meet a particular severe
strain. Alfred of England, to give one example out of
hundreds, levied a considerable force of this kind from
the southern counties when he set out to prevent this
part of Britain being wholly laid waste by the pagan
pirates. He summoned, as we hear in the contempo-
rary record, the men of the neighbouring counties,
save those who, from one district, had fled oversea.
This does not mean, of course, that Alfred summoned all
the inhabitants of the counties near his standard when

74 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

he had set it up in Penselwood, where Dorset and Somer-
set meet. It means that he summoned what we call
today the squires, the chief landholders, each followed
by his small band of armed men.

The fighting class thus formed, grew, as the siege of
Christendom proceeded, to regard itself as something
special in Society. It was not only the richest class but
it did the most arduous and perilous work for the com-
munity, and there arose the conception of the armed
mounted man as a being apart, superior of his nature to
the rest of lay mankind. He was of the “ noblesse,” a
man of “ race ” (which is the original meaning of the
English word “ gentleman ”).

No doubt this half-religious feeling, this distinction of
“ blood,” this separation of a leading class apart from the
mass of the community, was reinforced by ancestral
memories. The Gauls had a very strong feeling of the
distinction between a nobility and the mass of the clan,
as they also had a very strong feeling of the distinction
between the man consecrated to religion and the layman.
Gaul remained the centre and main area of Christendom
during the Great Siege. The Gallic spirit and the Gallic
race gave its tone to the society of all Western Europe in
those days when Western Europe was only kept alive
by the perpetual movements of armed forces mainly
recruited from the area of what is today called France.
But whatever other elements entered into the business,
the main element was this : the prestige of the principal
fighting men. That fighting class received dues from the
villages, of which its families were the lords, and organized
itself in a rough hierarchy, which we call feudalism.

That hierarchy was, as to its steps or ranks, principally
distinguished by income. Your lord of one manor or
village might receive in dues what we should call today
£500 to £1,000 in a year. His wealthier neighbour,
receiving aues from several manors, would be on the
scale of anything from £5,000 to £20,000 a year. Then
above these would come the great overlords, each of
whom not only possessed many villages himself, making

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 75

him richer than anyone else in the district, but also
rights over public land which had formerly been the
Treasury Land of the Roman emperors — all that lay
outside the manorial system. The very highest of these
great landed men, those who stood at the summit of the
feudal pyramid, became in local power indistinguishable
from monarchy. A Count of Flanders or of Anjou or a
Duke of Normandy was supreme in his own district. He
would owe feudal homage to the King of France. He
would admit the titular sovereignty of the King of France,
and on the very rare occasions when the King of France
(himself chief feudal lord of the district around Paris)
summoned a quasi-national effort under arms, the local
ruler of Anjou and Normandy and the rest, was appealed
to ; but he would only come of his own free will.

The third characteristic which the siege of Christendom
produced during that annealment of Christian men was
the almost imperceptibly slow emancipation of those
who had been m the old pagan time, and remained for
many generations afterwards, slaves. Of this gradual
transformation whereby the slave who in the first
centuries of Christian Europe could be bought and sold
like any other chattel, turned later into the completely
free peasant of modern times, there has already been
mention. What we have to note here is the profundity
of the social revolution thus effected. The old terms
were used continuously for centuries. The very word
“ serf ” which we write today with the special object
of distinguishing a man who was not a slave, only
constrained to certain fixed labour, possessed of property
and of hereditary rights, and engaged for the most part
upon labour the fruits of which he himself enjoyed, is
merely the Latin word for slave , given a later form.

Nothing intentional was at work, no direct and explicit
laws or edicts produced any one step in this very slow
instinctive development of the pagan slave into the
Christian peasant — a matter of a thousand years. Never-
theless, the real agency at work is plain enough when
one sees the thing on its largest lines. That agency was

76 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the religion which all men held in common, of whatever
rank, whatever poverty, or whatever wealth. It had in
the beginning of the process become more and more
impossible morally to “ buy and sell Christian men.”
The separation of families under the system of slavery
was not consonant with the ethic to which converted
Europe was bound. It was this, much more than any
economic development, which effected the great change,
and of all the changes which the Catholic spirit of Europe
wrought during the pressure of the Great Siege, this was
the most enduring.

It has so thoroughly recast the whole political and
social conscience of Western European man that he has
forgotten his servile origins. He is penetrated with the
conception of citizenship spread over the whole com-
munity. All his modem experiments take this for
granted, from the sanest to the most extravagant.

But let this be noted : Even as we gradually trans-
formed ourselves from slaves into freemen under the
influence of the Catholic Faith, so in the loss of it we
are beginning to tread the road downward again. With
the decay of religion, that which none of the reformers
dream of (as yet), but which is apparent by implication
in all they do, the Servile State, Society based upon,
and marked with the stamp of, slavery, is returning.

Let it be further noted that the long duration of this
“ siege ” — during which Christendom, in its isolation
and peril and suffering and pressure from without, had
ceased to develop its already decayed material civilization,
had lost the conception of universal codified law and lived
by custom and tradition — produced by its very duration
a certain spirit the opposite of that connected with our
modem activities — but also with our modem unrest and
danger of disruption.

It produced a spirit of Status, individuals and the classes
of Society being bound one to another not by terminable
contract as they are today, but by the conception that
every man had his place and fixed duties which he had
inherited and could hand on to his descendants. The

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 77

serf paying his dues of labour and produce, the small
free man who lived side by side with him in the village
and was also bound by custom to certain dues, the lords
of villages receiving their feudal incomes, the overlords
above them, the craftsmen in the towns — all these took
for granted each his position in an organized society which
called from each man certain activities, but guaranteed
subsistence and the family.

There was exploitation ; there was the institution of
one man working for the profit of another ; but it
worked by fixed rules and inheritance, not by com-
petition ; the livelihood of those working was not in
jeopardy, the revenues paid to superiors in that feudal
society were known and fixed, the class distinctions were
consecrated by the great length of time through which
they had grown and by the fixity of the succession
from generation to generation.

Christian society had become static — but static also
means stable. It had become an organized thing the
rules of whose life would remain a strong framework
preserving the character of the whole and its shape
through the coming expansion of energy and knowledge.

On account of this fixity, of this mass of traditional
custom taken for granted in all men’s minds, but most
of all on account of the universal accepted religion with
its ubiquitous liturgy and philosophy explaining the
nature and spiritual doom or beatitude of man, his
immortality and his relation to the Divine — as to all these
things at the end of the Dark Ages, the soul of Europe
stood upon solid ground.

We are about to see it passing into a new phase of
intense activity when it flowered into the true Middle
Ages and established what was perhaps the highest point
in the history of our race.

(B)

THE HIGH MIDDLE AGES

We are discussing a civilization the highest and the
best of which history has any record ; the civilization of
Christendom. We have followed its strange birth, its
rapid growth and strong organization, its triumph over
the whole world, that is, its capture of the pagan Graeco-
Roman Empire in which are rooted all the traditions
of our culture and from which we all descend. For
Christendom indeed, is no more than “ the Empire
baptized ” — but that “ no more ” is of such prodigious
magnitude that it is beyond all hyperbole. The
conversion of the Empire and the consequences thereof
form the capital event in the history of the world.

Since we are so discussing a particular civilization, how
it was formed and established by its united philosophy of
religion, and since we must regard that civilization as the
supreme thing it was and is, we approach the climax of
its manifestation with a certain awe. That climax
followed on the great siege which Christendom had stood
during the Dark Ages and had so successfully beaten off
so far as the West, at least, was concerned. In the first
generation of the Xlth century — say about 1020 to 1030
— when, the siege having been successfully raised,
Christendom began to go forward sure of itself, burgeon-
ing and putting forth its fresh powers, then was the
beginning of the period during which our people, our
culture were most themselves, when the effect of the
religion which made us was wholly mature, complete,
and victorious. It may best be called “ The High
Middle Ages ” and it covers the great 300 years of the
Xlth, Xllth, and XHIth centuries : that is from a little
after the date 1000 until a little after the date 1300.

78

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 79

The term “ Middle Ages,” like the term “ Dark Ages,”
has been used very loosely and generally. We do well,
therefore, to define that term. We have already defined
what may properly be called the Dark Ages — the time
during which Christendom was constantly under peril
and pressure, when so much of material civilization was
lost and when at the cost of continual and mortal struggle
our fathers survived the attack of barbarism. This
succeeding and central phase in our story, the Middle
Ages, may be said to last until the Renaissance, the fall of
Constantinople, the revolution in the arts and general
culture, and the disaster of the Reformation, when what
had so long been our united common heritage was
broken up.

The whole of such a period would cover 500 years,
from somewhat after the year 1000 to somewhat after the
year 1500, and it is, indeed, to this long stretch of 500
years that the term “ Middle Ages ” is commonly applied.
But we understand the thing much better if we dis-
tinguish between the earlier and the later part.

The first 300 years, which, I say, may properly be
called the true Middle Ages, because the virtues of
medieval civilization were at their highest and its charac-
teristics at their strongest and best, came to an end
with the early XIVth century. The remaining 200 years,
from the beginning at least of the Papal exile until the
wild, confused revolt of Luther and the much more
important anti-Catholic edifice of Calvin, have a very
different savour. The mass of the XIVth and all the
XVth century is a period in which external civilization
is rising, but in which the soul of Christendom pro-
gressively suffers. With that lamentable spiritual decline
we will deal later. Here we are engaged upon the
flowering of Christendom, the summit reaching up to
the full development of the XHIth century : from 1200
to 1300.

Let not any man’s admiration of this, the chief achieve-
ment of our race, be lessened or warped by the inevitable
contrast between the present and the past. Manifestly,

80 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

one period will have advantages which another period
lacks, the better period will be less fortunate in many
things than the worse period which succeeds it. The
elements of a culture are always in process of change.
But those who cannot feel the call of the true Middle
Ages and their correspondence to all that is strongest in
our blood, those who complain that they lacked amenities
we now possess, forgetting how much we have also lost,
have a poor comprehension of history. Were the most
devoted modem man and the greatest admirer of that
time to find himself put down suddenly upon the peak
of the true Middle Ages, say the year 1270, he would miss
very much that is necessary to him. He would be in an
atmosphere which, however congenial to him, would be
foreign. But it is the part of wisdom to mark the
difference in quality between what has been lost and
what has been gained. An example in one sentence may
suffice : There were no potatoes ; hut then , also , there were
no suicides.

We start, then, with that first generation of the Xlth
century. The Scandinavian pirates who had attacked us
over the North Sea had been converted. Much of
their barbarism remained, but they would never more
threaten destruction. They had become part of our
culture.

The hordes, a mixture of ill defined types (many of
them Slavonic), who had attacked the centre of Europe,
were defeated and tamed, even the Mongols. Hungary
itself, where the Mongols had fixed themselves, was already
baptized, and the West was secure. The Mohammedan
attack, indeed, had succeeded ; it had captured and was
holding all that part of Christendom which had lain
along the southern and eastern Mediterranean, and later
it was to go further still. But in the West, at any rate,
we had begun to press back even that formidable foe.
For in northern Spain the reconquest of the peninsula had
begun. Navarre had proved itself in policy worthy of
independence, Aragon was founded, the beginnings of
Castile had appeared. “ The March of the Ebro,” the

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 81

Catalan forework, challenging the Mohammedan power
at Saragossa, was permanently held.

The advance had begun.

It is well to take the great period by its three centuries :
from 1000 to 1300. It is not, of course, exactly
divided by each term of 100 years, but falls into three
main divisions which, with some overlap, do roughly
correspond to such an arrangement.

There is, first, what may be called the Xlth century,
from this first generation, say 1020-1030 to the opening
generation beyond the year 1100, which saw the initial
success of the first great crusade.

The next period, also about 100 years, the Xllth
century, which overlaps into the XHIth, gives us the
establishment of nearly all our great institutions, the
Parliaments, the Universities and the rest. It is the
moment of the Plantagenet power in England and its
rival, the newly strengthened kingdom of France. It
gives us also the characteristic architecture of the Middle
Ages, generally called the Gothic — the pointed arch, the
type of the great remaining cathedrals of the period.

The greatest century of all follows, the XHIth, which
we may date from the Battle of Muret, or the decisive
Christian victory of Navas in Spain, or, a minor matter,
from Magna Charta* in England. This century is the
century of the great medieval characters — of the Friars
— that is of St. Dominic and St. Francis — the summit
of medieval philosophy (the work of St. Thomas Aquinas),
the summit of medieval literature, for, though the Divine
Comedy appears after 1300, its supreme poet belongs
to the last generation of that time.

To begin with the Xlth century.

We were still emerging from darkness. There was still
much that was half barbaric about our society. Look at
the imperfect sculpture, the crude ornament which still
is attempted on the strong capitals of the Romanesque,

* " Magna CAarta ” 11 the age-long, traditional pronunciation of thii
document, which, though corrupt, ihould be retained. The more correct
" Magna Carta ” is a modern innovation.

82 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

or read the splendid but unpolished epic, The Song of
Roland, or mark the simplicity of strategy and tactics.

The first sign of the coming change was the further
centralization of power in the Church and the beginning
of a new challenge to the encroachments of lay govern-
ment. The Church is not only centralized, but its
discipline of celibacy is strengthened and perfected. The
Papacy, which in the West was not only the symbol but,
in a fashion, the cause of unity, took on such new vigour
that its enemies have called it a change in character.
This it was not. It was a strengthening and development
without which we should never have had the high
civilization that was to follow.

The spirit that presided over this change was that of
a great Benedictine abbey, the abbey of Cluny. The
Cluniac spirit informed the whole, and Cluny sent out
that very great man with whose name the separation of
the Papacy and the Church in general from lay control
will always be bound up — Hildebrand of Tuscany.

Here a caution must be issued against a popular myth
appearing in a host of textbooks, most typically, perhaps,
in the monograph of Bryce on the Holy Roman Empire :
the myth that the Saxon Emperors invading Italy from
the Northern Germanies originated the regeneration of
Papal power.

They did nothing of the kind. It is true that, at the
end of the Dark Ages, the institution of the Papacy had
gone through a bad period ; great families had captured
it to their own profit ; immature members of them and
unworthy members had occupied the central see, and
reform was due. But the action of the Saxon Emperors
had not for its main motive, reform ; it had for its main
motive the thrusting back of Byzantine power. The
Roman families who seized the Chair of Peter were
concerned quite as much as the Saxon Emperors to
keep out the East.

The Emperor of Constantinople, who had never really
accepted the imperial title in the West, did what he
could to maintain his hold upon Italy and still dreamed

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 83

of being the civil head of all Christendom, with Popes to
be in the long ran as subservient to him as were the
metropolitans of New Rome on the Bosphorus. It was
against this influence that the Saxon Emperors moved,
and, had they succeeded, they would have made the
Papacy a German thing. The successor of St. Peter
would have been nominated by the German Kings, and
the lay power would have reasserted itself more than
ever. From that the great Hildebrandine Reform saved
us. The thing was not done without violent struggle.
Hildebrand himself, when, from being the chief adviser
of the Papacy, he had become Pope (St. Gregory VII),
died under the impression of defeat. Everyone knows
the famous cry, “ I have loved justice and hated iniquity,
and therefore I die in exile.” In reality, St. Gregory
had won; for there came in to support the newly
invigorated Papacy the strength of the Normans.

The coming of the Norman state and soldiery is a
peculiar episode standing at the origins of the true Middle
Ages and colouring them for three generations. Having
had this strong effect, the special Norman character
disappears.

What made this new “ Norman energy,” the second
characteristic of the opening Xlth century and the
founding of the true Middle Ages ? Why, having arisen,
did it disappear so soon ?

It is in full activity before the middle of the century
when the Duke of Normandy, Robert the Devil, left his
throne to that illegitimate son of his who was to become
so famous, William of Falaise. It was at its height when
this same William of Falaise established his claim to the
throne of England at Hastings ; it continued under
Bohemond during all the first Crusade, then almost
suddenly in the next lifetime it is gone.

The question of how this strange thing arose, why it
was so limited in time, and the rest, certainly cannot be
fully answered. One suggestion is that, just as a small
proportion of carbon turns iron into steel, so some small
proportion of Scandinavian northern blood mixing with

84 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the Gallo-Romans of the Second Lyonnese accounts for
the short-lived Norman race and power. It may be so.

We have seen how the Second Lyonnese had been
given by the Emperor to the command of a Scandinavian
pirate force which had harried it a century before during
the Dark Ages, and the chief fighting men of that
Scandinavian bodv had intermarried with the lords of
the Cotentin and the lower Seine valley. That ad-
mixture of blood may have had in the long run some effect.

At any rate, the thing happened. Men filled with the
spirit of adventure, singularly constructive, astute organ-
izers as well as great soldiers, came from Normandy for
three generations. A small body of such, sprung from
a family of middle nobles near the western coast of the
Norman province, set out to try their fortunes in South
Italy, which had been harried by the Mohammedans and
which the Byzantines, who claimed to be the rightful
government there, ill defended. These adventurers hired
themselves out and took the risks of battle against the
Mohammedans, as also against the dwindling Byzantine
power. They married the local heiresses ; they recruited
larger and larger forces from the local south Italian and
Sicilian inhabitants as their successes increased ; they
joined forces with the Papacy, supporting it against the
Germans and against tne Greeks, They ended by
holding from the Papacy as feudal kings Sicilian Naples
and what had been the Greek cities and territories in
Italy south of the Papal States. Their government
became a model of precision, accuracy, and centralized
power, and it was a younger son of that same now royal
family who became the chief figure of the First Crusade.

While this vigorous thrust was going forward (the
Norman occupation of power in South Italy and Sicily
and the later establishment of a Norman dynasty in
England), the local monarchies, long existing in name,
were beginning to gather power. Those winch sprang
from the valleys of the Pyrenees and the unconquered
fringe of northern Spain grew powerful through gradual
success over the Mohammedan. Provence exhibited a

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED

85

separate life, and the House that was the feudal head of
all the great French districts, nominally superior to the
local rulers of Normandy and Brittany, Flanders,
Aquitaine and the rest, the House of Paris (it had long
borne title “ Kings of France ”) gave signs of the strength
which it was to increase so greatly in the next generation.

Yet another mark of the new energy was what has been
finely called “ The Awakening of the Great Curiosity.”
(The phrase is Michelet’s.) It was an intellectual move-
ment not without peril. It engendered the Albigensian
movement, the first of the great heresies which were to
endanger our reinvigorated Christendom, but it was a
mark of superabundant life. For the first time since
the disastrous Mohammedan enthusiasm, the mysteries
of religion were attacked, but this time from within.

The central rite, the vital liturgy of Christendom, the
pivot, as it were, of all the Faith in action, the Blessed
Sacrament, was challenged. The challenge is associated
with the name of a bleric of north France, a native of
Tours, one Berengarius. He first began to rationalize
that which Mohammed in his violent simplification of
religion had abandoned altogether. The new heretical
effort did not abandon the Real Presence, but it
attempted to modify the doctrine on rationalist lines.

The great and successful opponent of Berengarius,
Lanfranc, the mighty Italian who was the right hand of
William the Conqueror in England, was Archbishop of
Canterbury and the champion of the Sacrament of the
Altar. It was from this controversy that arose, it would
seem, what has become one of the characteristic gestures
in the liturgy of the Western Church and of the Latin
Mass : the Elevation. Lanfranc originated a habit of
pausing for a moment over the Host immediately after
Consecration and raising it slightly before his face to adore
it. From this, it is believed, the Elevation in its later
form grew.

At the very end of this first division of our period, the
Xlth century, came the most famous manifestation of its
young, exuberant power, the Crusades. A new wave of

86 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Turkish barbarism had made itself master of the Near
East, including the holy places. Pilgrimage thither,
which, in spite of the Mohammedan power, had been
continuous, grew difficult. A great Turkish victory had
imperilled the Greek Christian culture and come to the
gates of Constantinople itself. The reaction to all this
had been the outpouring of crusaders by the hundred
thousand at the call of the Pope, Urban II, who carried
on the tradition and the work of Hildebrand. Several
armies on the scale of 80,000 men each, were gathering.
When the final strength was reached, something like a
third of a million men accompanied by perhaps as many
again of half-armed or unarmed pilgrims, crossed the
ruined and deserted land of Asia Minor, took Antioch,

f ressed through Syria, and ultimately stormed Jerusalem,
t was Gibbon’s “ World’s Debate ” : The Crusade.

It was in the last year of the century, July 15, 1099,
that the Crusaders had mastered Jerusalem and the Holy
Sepulchre and had established their Christian Latin
Kingdom, almost cutting the Mohammedan world in two.
All these outbursts, the new vigour, the reform of the
Church, the Norman adventures, the Crusades, in-
augurate the strength of the Middle Ages and fill the
Xlth century with their strength and storm.

The Xllth century, the second stage of this rapid
advance into the fullness of the high medieval culture, is
the century of the main developments. Institutions of
which the seeds had been sown generations before, and
which had begun to pierce ground in the Xlth century,
during the Xllth became vigorous plants, many of which
have endured to this day.

It is the century of the Parliaments, that is, of
assemblies representing every class of the community and
gathering under the head of the community, the King,
in order to arrange what voluntary aid could be given
to him for public purposes under some special strain,
usually of war. For it must be remembered that there
were no taxes as yet in the medieval state. The king
was supposed to administer out of the income with

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED

87

which the Crown was endowed, that is, out of his own
income, out of the dues he got from his private pos-
sessions and from the public land. When something
more was exceptionally needed, he had to ask for it from
his subjects as a favour and a grant. He could not
impose it. Hence Parliaments.

The first of these bodies arose in the little Christian
states of the Pyrenees, at that time the most vital
provinces of Christendom, because they had borne the
brunt of the battle against the Mohammedan. The
earliest known and recorded Parliament of Europe is to
be found right back in the Xlth century : the Parliament
of Huesca, well before the Norman Conquest of England.
From the Pyrenees the institution spread northward and
even appears fully formed at last in England, usually the
latest province of the West to receive any new institution.
There was no full Parliament in England until the latter
part of the XHIth century.

Another influence spreading with the Xllth century
was vernacular literature. There had always been poems
and pious writings in the tongue of the populace, side by-
side with the main Latin language of the West in which
all important records and dates were set down. These
popular dialects, which we call today “ vernacular,” were
especially lively in Britain, where there was a whole
Anglo-Saxon literature that did not die out till a lifetime
after the Norman Conquest. In the bulk of Christen-
dom, the vernacular literature begins to mark in this
Xllth century, having already appeared two lifetimes
before in epic songs. The Xllth century also saw, as I
have said, a revolution in architecture. It produced the
pointed arch, the ogive, a feature characteristic of all
Western Christendom henceforward. This arose in the
district of Paris, spread thence throughout France and
England, from the Valley of the Rhine to northern
Spain, supplanting the ola round arch (Romanesque) of
the Dark Ages.

It is with the Xllth century that you get a new en-
thusiasm for the higher learning and its debates. The

88 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

great schools begin to gather in Italy and in Gaul, and in
Spain and in the Rhine valleys and in Europe. They
become the universities of which Paris was perhaps the
most famous. It is the leaders of thought therein and
the great debates between them, such as the conflict
between Abelard and St. Bernard, which give life to the
foundation of this new thing. Then again the Xllth
century shows the first beginnings, very vague and
tentative, not yet fully conscious, of national units in
Christendom following the ruling houses. It is the
moment of the Plantagenets, the men who were not only
independent kings of England, but virtually independent
rulers of half France, rivals to the French lungs who were
in feudal theory their overlords. No man in Europe as
yet thought of himself in terms of nationality. A man
thought of himself in terms of holding from this or that
lord, ultimately from this or that great overlord. But
that local spirit which was later on to make the nations
of Europe, had already begun to arise in the greater part
of united Christendom.

But perhaps the most striking thing about the Xllth
century was the continued growth of the Papal power.
It had challenged those lay encroachments which had
marked the Dark Ages. It had, as we have seen,
challenged the German tutelage of the Roman See, and
now in the next lifetime, it was affirming with all its
strength the doctrine of Church investiture.

In no field was the struggle more violent. The old
right of the Church to govern itself, to consecrate its own
officers, to form a completely free, self-governing cor-
poration coincident with Christendom was offended by
the claim to clerical power of local kings, and especially
of the chief civil power, the Emperor, ultimate ruler
over North Italy and the Germanies. The Papacy
maintained that, though great bishops and abbots were
feudal lords, the Church and the Church alone could
decide upon their office. Only the Pope could invest
the candidate bishop with his office. But, all society
having become feudal, great bishoprics and abbacies

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 89

were lords over masses of lay dues, and, what is more,
were liable for armed forces when the king issued a
summons for such. Therefore, it seemed essential that
the king should invest the bishops also. In the end there
was a compromise. The spiritual power invested the
candidates with the spiritual revenues of their sees or
abbeys ; the lay power invested them with their lay
revenue. In practice, the appointment as well as the
investiture of these powerful officials mainly fell to the
lay government, but they were not and could not be
appointed without the consent of the Papacy as well.
And here as in everything else, the new tie made for the
strengthening of the See of Rome.

With the institutions in the Middle Ages thus rapidly
growing, the whole of its life becoming more and more
secure, more confident of its own strength and order, we
reach after the year 1 200 — that is, in the Xlllth century
— the flowering time of our race.

The Xlllth century was that moment in which the high
Middle Ages reached their summit. It was that moment
in which the Catholic culture came, in the civic sense of
the word “ culture,” to maturity. It was probably the
supreme moment of our blood, at any rate one of the very
greatest moments. Never had we had such a well-
founded society before, never have we since had any
society so well founded or so much concerned with justice.
A proof, if proof were needed, of the greatness of that
time is the scale of the chief public characters, already
named : St. Louis the King, Ferdinand of Castile ;
St. Dominic and St. Francis, with their new orders of
friars ; Edward I of England ; and, in philosophy, which
determines all, the towering name of St. Thomas Aquinas.
He established during that great time a body of co-
ordinated doctrine and philosophy which no one had yet
possessed. The scale of his work is on a par with its
cultural value. He seemed to have put his seal upon
the civilization which he adorned, and, through his
establishment of right reason in philosophy, his marriage
of Catholicism with the Aristotelian wisdom, to have set

90 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

up a structure that would endure for ever and give a
norm to our civilization.

It was not destined to establish us in so much peace.
We were fated to continue the perpetual changes of
Europe. The XHIth century, which felt itself to be (as
it was) the prime moment of our blood, suffered from our
common mortality, and, in the first years of the XIVth
century a decline had begun. Yet had we some right to
boast of a spiritual and political security which was
established apparently for ever, and of a Christian
civilization which should endure indefinitely. The last
great effort to destroy Christian society from within, the
Albigensian movement, had been crushed and that
power which was the main external enemy to the spirit
of the Church in Europe, the genius of Frederick II, the
Emperor, “ The Marvel of the World ” ( Stupor Mundt)
was also defeated.

That century did, indeed, commit at its outset one
grievous blunder, the consequences of which we still feel
in the apparent impossibility of reconciling the Greek
Church with the Latin and of achieving the unity of both
under the Papacy. This heavy blunder was the
expedition wrongly called the Fourth Crusade. It set
out nominally in aid of Constantinople and for the
recovery of the Holy Land, which had been lost to the
Turks. From such a purpose, the true tradition of all
the Crusades, it was deflected by the government of
Venice, without which the Crusade could have had no
transports. Constantinople owed money to the Venetian
Repuolic, which was the banking state of the day. To
recover that debt, Venice used the crusading army,
bringing it up the Bosphorus against the Imperial City.
The Western or Latin Christians won, they forced the
Latin liturgy upon shrines of the Greek capital,
saying a Latin Mass on the altar of St. Sophia itself,
so threatening the Greek rite. But they had wounded
the Greek-speaking and Greek-worshipping world of the
Christian East as deeply as a wound could pierce. There
is a traditional sentence in which that violently and justly

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 91

roused animosity expressed itself : “ Better a devil on
the altar of St. Sophia than a Roman Cardinal
pontificating there.”

The so-called Fourth Crusade only imposed the Latin
Mass and a Latin government precariously. The experi-
ment did not last a lifetime. All had reverted to Greek
usage and liturgy well before the end of the century ; but
the injustice had been committed, hatred had been
planted in a fiercer form than ever before between
Constantinople and Europe, and the hopes of unity were
destroyed, apparently for ever. There was, indeed,
official effort at unity in the very last mortal crisis when
the Imperial City on the Bosphorus was on the point of
falling for ever to the Turk. That formal reconciliation
between the Eastern and the Western churches is
pompously recorded on the very stones of Florence as
though it were immutable. But all that was really
recorded was the epitaph of united Christendom.

In spite of that one great blunder, however, the XHIth
century was what I have called it, a promise of permanent
Christian order through justice. It founded a conception
of the State which seemed unshakable : — All society
arranged by status, every man in his place and knowing
his place, wealth rendered less odious and even noble by
stability and long succession, the well divided property
of the now almost free peasantry and the fully free crafts-
man of the towns guaranteed by guild and village custom,
a hierarchy of functions strictly bound in one feudal
scheme satisfactory to the political conscience of man,
and all that ordered social body guaranteed by the
vigorous faith whose officials, the clergy, came from every
source in society, enjoyed a moral authority they were
not later to know, and performed their mighty function
adequately and in full order.

Great monuments of the time remain with us, testifying
to its strength and solidity, but still more to that active
sense of beauty which is one aspect of the divine. The
XUIth century was the type of our society to which men
in their later distresses turned, to which, after all our

92 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

modern wrongheadedness, disasters are compelling ns to
turn again today. It is, of course, a folly to see perfection
in any human phase. The XHIth century suffered from
the Fall of Man as does the XXth, and as will every other
generation ; but it came nearer to the rule of justice on
earth than anything effected before or since. It was
doomed in the time that was coming, for, though its
philosophy was immortal, its instruments being human
were riddled with mortality. Even that shining spirit
grew old and began to fall. With that failure we shall

(c)

THE DECLINE OF THE MIDDLE AGES

This summit of the medieval culture, the time when
Europe was most herself, and when our race was probably
at its happiest, was doomed to decline. The most
glorious of those three centuries, the XHIth, was also
the last. Shortly after the year 1300 the change begins.
It was a tragic change in spite of the world in which it
took place, for it was the loss of that which had been our
joy and nearest our perfection . The decline lasts through
two centuries, from the beginning of the XIVth to the
beginning of the XVIth, and ends in the shipwreck of
the Reformation.

As in the rise of Christendom there was a spiritual
process going on side by side with the material one, so
also in the decline of Christendom after the year 1300.
But the two things were exactly contrasted ; in the rise
of Christendom, as we have seen, there was a decline of
material power ; the material side of civilization grew
coarser and less efficient ; Europe slipped down into the
Dark Ages in the generations preceding the end of the
Vth century ; but meanwhile there was spiritual advance,
the founding and consolidating of the Christian world,
the conversion of the old Roman Empire and the appear-
ance for the first time in the story of our people of a
united, an enthusiastically accepted religion.

In the second, contrasted, period, the end of the
Middle Ages, you have a material advance, an increasing
knowledge of the world both by discovery and through
the sciences (especially towards the end) ; you have an
increase in the arts, painting especially takes on a new
form altogether and enters a glory of its own which
increases for generations ; architecture grows more
93

9+ CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

refined, though at last more fantastic ; sculpture becomes
more glorious and never did it reach a higher level than
just when the Middle Ages were dying. But with all
this went a spiritual decline which at last worked like a
mortal disease in the heart of Christendom and led us
to the chaos of the Reformation.

From that blow Christendom never fully recovered.
Something was saved, as we know ; the Catholic Church,
threatened with extinction, survived and maintained a
great part of its jurisdiction over most of what had been
unitea Christendom, but a full, unquestioned, general
religious culture Europe was not to know again.

The sequence which this spiritual decline followed is
marked by various characters, of which five are the most
important.

(1) Unity, the very principle of life for Christendom
— unity of doctrine and unity of discipline and organiza-
tion in the field of religion — was shaken.

(2) The organic structure of the Catholic Church was
weakened as a consequence, and at the same time begins,
as it were, to “ ossify,” to grow stiff and dead.

(3) The old living restraints which preserved the body
of Christendom from decay and dissolution become more
and more mechanical ; authority finds itself depending
more and more upon force and less and less upon
agreement.

(4) Doubts and extravagances, two bad symptoms
in any religious scheme, expand throughout the body of
Christendom : doubts not only on doctrine, but also on
the titles to authority; extravagances in legends and
usages.

(5) The period is marked (especially towards the end)
by two complementary evils, necessarily following upon
the over-reliance of authority upon force. It is marked
by the evil of unworthy officers to preside over and
conduct the religion of Christendom, and it is marked
by the evil of increasing efforts of Churchmen to cure
by violence the bad consequences produced by their own
insufficiency ; so that at last in the XVth century and

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 95

early XVIth you get sometliing like a religious reign of
terror which is bound to exhaust itself and to break down.

All this sounds evil enough, and evil indeed it was, but
we must not exaggerate. The deterioration and worsen-
ing of religion as the Middle Ages closed, has, since the
Reformation, been much exaggerated by the permanent
enemies of the Catholic Church, and even more by those
who without a deliberate motive of hostility, are affected
by ignorance and by separation from Catholic tradition.

There was plenty of holy living ; there was the full
practice of the Faith even m the worst moments at the
very death of the Middle Ages ; there was a large body
of vital tradition which came at last to save our society
after the great quarrel at the close of the Middle Ages
had all but destroyed it. Moreover, while this spiritual
decline was going on, Europe was filled with an increasing
vitality. Men were not only perpetually learning new
things and glorying in discovery, but were filled, especially
towards the end of the period, with a zest for adventure.
There was something creative about the air in which the
Middle Ages came to an end ; but the forces at work
produced nothing permanent. They did not create, as
the last of the Pagan Empire had created, a Thing.

Christendom was shaken and almost dissolved, but so
far from a new inheritance taking its place, divisions
among men increased, until we reach the perilous extreme
in which we stand today, when our civilization is possessed
of greater powers over nature than ever it had before,
and yet seems bent on its own destruction.

These five main processes of spiritual decline must be
examined in a little more detail if we are to understand
them.

I say that in the first place unity was shaken, and that
was the underlying grievous thing from which all other
evils proceeded. Paradoxically, unity was the more
shaken because it had been the more thoroughly taken
for granted throughout the world ; nor was it until
disunion had done its full work that men woke up tardily
to the vital necessity of union.

9 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

The centre and sustenance of Christian unity was the
authority of the Apostolic See, and the threat to unity
appears precisely there.

In the high Middle Ages there had been that struggle
between the Papacy and the lay power, culminating in
the life-and-death conflict between Frederick II and the
Pope, who gradually got the better of that great Italian’s *
scepticism and usurpation of spiritual power.

From this conflict the Papacy emerged victorious.
The danger of the Pope’s becoming a mere servant of
the lay power and of the Emperor, with Germany and
Italy behind him, overshadowing and rendering sub-
servient the Christian body of the Latin West (as the
Eastern Empire had overshadowed and rendered
subservient the Greek East), was over. But there did
not follow, as there promised to follow, a long period
of equal balance between the central spiritual Papal
power and the powers of the Western Princes — the Bangs
of England, France, and the rising monarchs of Spain.
What followed was the capture of the Papal See by the
French monarchy. It had been rescued from becoming
an Imperial thing; it became a French thing.

The Popes left Rome, they settled in the town of
Avignon which, though not feudally subject to the French
King at Paris, was fully in the French culture. For seventy
years, that is, the full lifetime of a man, Rome was
deserted. A new Papal court, developing a spirit of
intricate finance, appeared upon the Rhone, and one
after another the Popes at Avignon were chosen from
men of French birth and speech.

That state of affairs, the central spiritual authority of
Christendom captured by one province of Christendom,
could not endure. Nor did it. Rival Popes were set
up and the Princes of Europe divided their allegiance
between one claimant and another.

When two national forces were at war, one would

* Part Italian in blood, wholly Italian in birth, upbringing, formation in
youth, mam reudence in maturity and native language. One of the ear licit
Italian poeti.

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 97

follow the Pope at Avignon and the other would deny
that Pope’s authority and accept the authority of an
anti-Pope. The scandal was not only enormous, but
profound. It went to the roots of Christendom ; for
it must be remembered that all the while the Papal
office was regarded as supreme, as being both the heart
and the head of Christian society, although men were
fighting as to who might properly claim it and although
it seemed to have lost the principle of identity. This
turmoil has been called “The Great Schism of the
West.” When at last it was healed and one Pope,
accepted by all Christendom, mounted that throne under
the title of Martin V, the Papacy was re-established
indeed in unity, but had most heavily lost in prestige.
The Popes were again in Rome, but in peril of becoming
mere Italian Princes. ✓

All this was the first shaking of unity ; the second was
the growth of national consciousness.

This new element was not for generations to reach a
level in which the ultimate unity of Christendom was
forgotten, but it continued to rise, and with every step
in the rise of national feeling from obscure half conscious
origins to the fierce rivalries at the end of the Middle
Ages, the unity of Christendom weakened. The Churches
themselves took on a national colour ; the local hierarchies
were not only the creatures of the Princes, but became
bodies separate, not of course in doctrine and discipline,
but in social habit, as indeed they have since remained,
even where unity has been preserved.

I have said that in the second place the organic
structure of religion weakened through a sort of ossifica-
tion. By a simile taken from the decline of the human
body one might compare the process to the hardening
of the arteries : that arterio-sclerosis which is the
characteristic mark of age in a living body. You see
this in three of its two main effects ; in the growth
of superstitions, in the warping of history through
legends, and, much more serious, in the attitude taken
towards the revenues and endowments of religion.

98 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Superstition did not intrench on doctrine. Many
write as though it had done so ; but those who thus
write, write bad history. Doctrine remained clear and
distinct and well founded throughout ; but the spirit
of superstition overlay it. For instance, the doctrine of
the Invocation of Saints is clear ; but towards the end
of the Middle Ages you get men robbing one shrine in
order to enrich another. The doctrine of the use of
Masses is clear, and especially their use for the benefit
of the souls in Purgatory ; but the superstition that a
Mass in this place was efficacious, and in that was not —
the superstition which confuses mechanical repetition
with spiritual force grew as the Middle Ages declined.

The strongest example of the thing is also the best
known, because it was the immediate occasion of the final
catastrophe ; I mean the attitude towards Indulgences.

The defined doctrine is perfectly clear. The authorities
of the Church can ascribe the spiritual advantages earned
by holy men and women as a sort of fund or surplus for
the benefit of others ; thus is an indulgence granted.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages in popular practice
the definition was forgotten, and indulgences, with too
many people, turned into something like a mechanical
service. Where they could be granted by the giving of
alms or money for a pious purpose, such as church-
building, too many men thought of them as spiritual
benefits that could be bought as medicines can be bought.

Side by side with this went the parallel evil of false
history.

A legend is essentially a parable : a story told not
as a true historical thing, but as a symbol. Legends were
of the utmost value through the beauty with which they
were clothed, and even of value through their humour ;
but they did harm instead of good when they began to be
taken as historical realities. And men were often more
attached to a local legend which gave them a false idea
of their own past than to the general truths of religion.
Neither a measure of superstition nor a measure of legend
mistaken for truth is mortal, but an excess of either can

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED

99

be mortal ; because men reacting against such excesses
will react against the whole body of religion. We know
how, after the great quarrel against the Church as a
whole had broken out, a vast mass of true history came
to be treated as legendary, and a vast mass of essential
doctrine and practice came to be treated as superstitions
through reaction against the extravagances of an earlier
time.

But, as I have said, the worst symptom of all was the
way in which Church endowment came to be treated as
the Middle Ages drew to a close. The religion of
Christendom which had slowly made our civilization until
it had culminated in the brilliant climax of the High
Middle Ages, had been from the beginning endowed.
Even when the Catholic Church was no more than an
unpopular, though vigorous, half-concealed society within
the old Pagan Empire it had had a regular organization
of funds which, though the civil authorities did not then
approve of the Church, were protected by law. It has
always been an instinct of the Church to guard its life
by economic independence.

When Catholicism became the accepted and universal
religion, endowments were largely increased and estab-
lished. There was a revenue for each diocese, of course,
supporting the Bishop and his activities, and a revenue
for the parishes as they were formed ; and these endow-
ments were fixed in shape of rents from land. There
were also dues payable, tithes of produce from the fields.
The monasteries were endowed with land by pious
foundation or the contributions of their original members.

As the Christian centuries proceeded this accumulation
of landed wealth in the hands of the Church got greater
and greater ; hospitals were endowed under Church
patronage, so were all places of education — the local
schools, and later the universities and their colleges. To
every clerical function, direct or indirect — to a prebend,
a canonry, a village presbytery, a monastery, a foundation
for Masses, a hospital, a school, etc. — there was its own
fixed revenue coming in from the dues paid upon land

ioo CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

by those who held it of the lord of the land. The lord
was in this case the clerical unit concerned, the see or
prebend or college or monastery or what not. By the
end of the Middle Ages through this perpetual accumula-
tion (from which there was very little leakage) the totals
had grown enormous.

It is commonly said that one-third of the wealth of
Europe was thus clerical. The phrase is ambiguous, for
the total wealth of a country includes the livelihood of
everybody in it ; what was really meant was that one-
third of the surplus values or rents and dues went to
Church endowments of one kind and another (including
education, hospitals, certain rest-houses on the great
roads of travel, etc.) and that only the remaining two-
thirds went as revenues to lay lords of all kinds. Possibly
that popular estimate is exaggerated ; possibly even at
the very end of the Middle Ages (say in the year 1500),
the total surplus values in clerical hands was not more
than a quarter of the whole. But even that was a
formidable proportion to be set aside for the support
of men who were but a small minority in the State,
though a minority who during all their useful periods
were carrying out vast and essential public functions,
including half the legal work and all the education.

Now the characteristic corruption at the end of the
Middle Ages was that these endowments came to be treated
as mere sources of private income. They had been intended
as means for the support of that active, useful and
necessary soul of society, the Church. But the means
came to be taken for the end, and they were more and
more treated as we treat stocks and shares and
bonds today.

Men invested in Church endowments. A man would
buy a prebend for a child of his, and virtually buy an
abbacy or the superiorship of a nunnery, which carried
with it a large endowment, for his daughter. A Bishopric
would be given by a king to a favourite or an official by
way of providing him with an income.

Again, the man enjoying the revenues of, say, a

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED ioi

Bishopric, would not be content with that, but would
hold at the same time another Bishopric, or even perhaps
two or three, keeping the revenues for himself and paying
a much lesser sum to a subordinate : “ farming out ”
the Church revenues in this fashion. Worse still, it
became quite common for some great abbey to be given
to a layman in commendam. This thoroughly irreligious
system became in some countries (such as Scotland)
almost universal. What had been in the past a great
Benedictine abbey with, say, twenty thousand pounds a
year of revenue, would be handed over to the bastard
of a king or any other favourite who would put in a
paid agent to act as abbot, while he himself kept the
bulk of the revenue under the legal fiction that he was
the “ guardian ” of the establishment. In general, all
over Christendom men saw these vast sums which had
been set aside for the proper conduct of the Church, for
alms to the poor, for education, medicine, etc., used as
private fortunes, and often so used not even by clerics,
but by laymen.

Here again we must not exaggerate ; the evil was very-
great and it was everywhere, but it was not universal.
The great bulk of the Church’s income still continued to
be used for the right purposes ; for the conduct of the
liturgy, the upkeep of the churches, colleges, hospitals,
schools, etc. But towards the end of the Middle Ages
men had grown used to the scandal of religious or quasi-
religious endowment being thought of as so much private
revenue to be used indifferently for the right purposes
or the wrong. It may be imagined how increasingly
the mass of men (who are poor and to whom the Church
should act as succour, guardian and guide) resented the
abuse. Their resentment was a chief cause of the explosion
that followed.

Another step in the process of disintegration was the
growth of doubt ; disturbance and uncertainty on what
had once been certainly held doctrines, believed in by
all Society. New physical discovery had much to do
with the spread of this spirit ; even geographical

102 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

discovery, which began to expand as the Middle Ages
declined, helped to disturb men’s minds on the nature
of the universe, and therefore on doctrine ; while corrup-
tion among the clergy disturbed men’s minds on the
validity of the Sacraments. It began to be maintained
that a Sacrament was not valid unless the Churchman
administering it was in the state of grace. It was but
a step from this to saying that the sacramental power of
the clergy was an illusion. That was at the back of
the movement with which in England the name of
Wvcliffe is connected.

Especially did doubts upon the Real Presence grow,
until they spread to great masses of the populace. A
sort of universal tendency to heresy was “ in the air ” as
the Middle Ages proceeded to their close ; and side by
side with it there went what seems to be the universal
accompaniment of doubt, illusion. We have mentioned
the abuse of indulgences. The visiting and cultus of
relics, coupled with payments of alms, perilously ap-
proadied in the popular mind the conception of mere
purchase : the buying and selling of spiritual power.
A vast extension of Masses said for the dead got en-
tangled with these extravagant ideas. Meanwhile the
growth of scholarship and the critical spirit, exploding
legends and superstitions on every side, continued to
weaken the structure of religion.

An excellent example of this was the “ Donation of
Constantine.” There is no doubt that Constantine in
moving the capital of the Empire to Byzantium left
in the West great political powers to the Bishop of
Rome; but a document which purported to confirm
special powers to the Pope under the hand of the
Emperor and known as the “ Donation ” was quoted as
genuine, though marked by fantastic fables. The
“ Donation ” was not the foundation of the Papal
temporal power, but it had been used in confirmation
of it, so that when it was proved to be legendary the
respect for the Papacy was shaken.

The last feature of the decline was that which has stood

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 103

out vividly in the mind of posterity more than any other ;
to this day the enemies of the Catholic Church em-
phasize it more violently than anything else. It was
this : As moral authority weakened, mechanical restraint
strengthened.

It is always so. The use of force, punishment, threat
and fear are necessary for the keeping of order and the
maintenance of right laws in action. But in a healthy
state of affairs much the greater part in the strength of
authority is moral. Men obey because they think they
ought to obey ; because they feel that the authority
which governs them has a right to do so. As moral
authority weakens, those who exercise authority tend to
fall back upon physical restraint, punishment, and the
irrational fear of consequences as a method of administra-
tion. That is what happened towards the end of the
Middle Ages. Force alone was used against heresy in
every form, and not only against heresy but even
against grumblings at the powers of the clergy.

We have said with little exaggeration that the end of
the Middle Ages was a “ religious reign of terror.” In
the older and simpler days capital punishment seemed a
natural consequence of heresy because heresy was an
attempt to break up that Christian society by which all
men lived. It was at once a treason and a murder, and
the people themselves were ready to impose capital punish-
ment if the authorities were slack, just as today men will
take the law into their own hands by lynching if they
think that justice will not be done in a matter where
they feel strongly. But later on, in the efforts to maintain
spiritual authority, everywhere attacked and losing its
moral sanctions, the officers of the Church fell back with
increasing severity and frequency upon restraint by fear.

The burning of people alive as a punishment was a
thing of very old establishment, dating back for more
than a thousand years right into the Roman Empire.*
It was a civil punishment only occasionally used, but none

* For instance • Julian the Apostate burnt alive officials who had refused to
betray the legitimate emperor, his rival

i<>4 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the less familiar to men’s minds. It was attached to
certain heinous crimes quite apart from religion, for
instance, coining — that is, the making of false money.
But towards the end of the Middle Ages its use became
extravagant and the spirit of it continued long after the
Reformation, as for instance its use against witchcraft,
and against those who in Spain were conspiring against
the State. This evil, the association of violence and
horrible punishment with the maintenance of orthodoxy,
grew rapidlv throughout the end of the decline ; and
nothing did more to provoke the violent outburst to
follow, in which the unity of Christendom was broken
asunder.

Let us end by considering, in a critical spirit applied
to document and tradition, the probable causes of that
general spiritual decline, accompanied as it was by steady
advance in knowledge and mastery over the material
world.

It is always very difficult to ferret out the causes of
any great social movement ; because its roots lie deep
and hidden, stretching far into the past ; and with all
that, are invariably complicated and entangled. But it
may fairly be said that the main cause of the decline
was old age ; mortality. Any human institution being
administered by mortals is in peril continually of that fate.

The Church itself was regarded (and will continue to
be regarded by its adherents) as immortal, but its ad-
ministration is subject to perpetual threat of mortality,
that is, of corruption and weakness tending to extinction.
In vigorous periods the tendency is as strong as in periods
of weakness ; only, in vigorous periods, it is countered
by perpetual watchfulness and readiness to reform,
whereas when the soul of Society is sick the counteraction
weakens. In the high Middle Ages the tendency to all
that would weaken Christendom was vigorously coun-
tered ; in the later Middle Ages it was allowed to grow
and given greater and greater play, and was combated
bjr mechanical means of repression, rather than by
vigorous spiritual self-examination and self-discipline.

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED

i°S

Next we find as a cause the disintegrating effect of
rapid discovery, especially towards the end of the process.
When the spiritual life is vigorous it can deal with,
absorb, digest, no matter what novel truth. Thus the
coming of a restored Greek philosophy and some measure
of Greek learning upon Western Christendom of the
Xllth century was a disturbance due to discovery, to
the expansion of what may be called in the largest sense
of the word “ science.” It proffered an example of what
we find successively throughout every period of human
expansion, the conflict between religion and science ;
that is, between spiritual concepts and the clothing
thereof in particular forms which prove untenable under
the light of further knowledge. The true Middle Ages
dealt strongly with the new knowledge, digested it,
incorporated it ; in the high climax of that civilization
St. Thomas became the exponent of Aristotle and married
his philosophy to the theology of the Church Universal.
But with the later Middle Ages the power thus to digest
declined.

As the voyages of discovery, begun with the XIVth
century, expanded men’s knowledge of the world in
which they lived, that expansion of knowledge disturbed
their fixed habits of thought upon the universe ; so did
each new invention as applied to travel and to the arts.
There is no rational connection between the expansion
of temporal knowledge and the loss of spiritual certitude ;
but the expansion of knowledge interferes with fixed
habits of mmd, and among these are the forms which
spiritual certitude takes. The discovery that what had
been thought historical truth was in reality a legend ;
that what had been thought a genuine relic was false ;
that what had been thought a genuine document was a
romance or a forgery, did not invalidate the doctrine of
relics, nor true documents, nor sound tradition ; but by
an association of ideas the advance of such discoveries
shook the ordinary mind in its grasp of truth.

Among the new instruments thus at work which proved
of most violent effect was that of printing. The press

10 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

created a sort of new false authority. It would present
speculation in the form of affirmed facts and, what is more
important, it would proclaim that fact to many minds at
the same moment and in the same form. Printing diffused
true knowledge, but it also diffused (and on a far greater
scale) false knowledge and unproved irrational affirmation.
Among other things it gave vastly added strength to the
irrational concept that a document is alone important to
the proof of anything in the past and that tradition may
be neglected. From that error we suffer heavily today ;
men forget that tradition, though it gets warped with
time and tends to be diverse and vague, is commonly
sincere ; whereas a document may be, and, if official,
commonly is, deliberately false.

Another obvious cause of social and therefore spiritual
decline in the end of the Middle Ages was the dragging
out of the interminable raids called “ The Hundred
Years’ War.” The French-speaking kings of England
had a much better claim to the inheritance of the crown
of France in the XIVth century than our textbooks
usually allow. They pursued that claim with the idea
of founding a great Western monarchy to include both
France and England. The effort failed, but not until
it had dragged on for a hundred years, bringing poverty
and misery wherever the armies marched, from the first
main conflict at Crecy just before the middle of the
XIVth century, to the expulsion of the English garrisons
in Normandy more than a hundred years later.

But what had more effect in weakening religious unity
than these and twenty other possible causes that might
be invoked, was the pestilence now known (it was not
so called at the time) as the Black Death.

Pestilence was recurrent ; but the Black Death was, as
it were, the extra drop that made the cup run over. It
was a visitation upon a scale so enormous as to strike a
blow at medieval society which might have dissolved it
— and nearly did dissolve it. Certainly a third of
Western Christendom died within two years in the middle
of the XIVth century. In many places there is sufficient

CHRISTENDOM ESTABLISHED 107

proof that half the population disappeared. In some
places towns and villages sank never to rise again. It
was a form of bubonic plague which had spread from
the east and ran through the ports of the Mediterranean,
so northward through France to England, even to the
extremes of European colonization in Greenland ; and
everywhere you may trace its effects even today in the
half-finished buildings which were stopped dead and
their completion never undertaken. Beauvais is one
example of this, so is the cathedral of Narbonne, so is
the parish church of Great Yarmouth in England ; and
there are hundreds of similar examples scattered up and
down the face of Western Europe.

The various divisions of Christendom were still further
separated by this violent calamity. Through it the
English language came into existence. The children of
the French-speaking wealthier classes in England could
no longer be trained on account of lack of teachers in
the tradition of French speech. There came about,
therefore, a fusion between what had been the language
of the governing classes of centuries and the various
mixed dialects (mainly Germanic) of the populace ; of
the servants, that is, by whom the richer children were
brought up, and of the village lads with whom the
children of the wealthy played. Hitherto for centuries
a Northern French idiom had been the governing tongue
of France and England. But after 1350-1400 the
Channel becomes more and more a language frontier.
The Black Death not only thus cut off England from
Europe, but also relaxed travel everywhere and alienated
district from district. It struck Europe with a wound
which might have been mortal, and from which, as a
fact, its unity and moral health never fully recovered.

All these things combined accompanied or led to the
breakdown of that high spiritual civilization whose crown
had been the XHIth century. Beauty was better served
on every side ; architecture, though it became somewhat
fantastic and less strong was certainly more detailed and
very lovely ; painting became an exquisite art ; the

108 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

vernacular literatures began to take on a new power of
their own : but even as the flower thus bloomed canker
was at the root.

Such was the process, and such apparently were the
causes of the process. As the result of that process there
accumulated an element of instability ; a strain which
clamoured for solution : a tension which became un-
bearable. Everything grew ready for an explosion : and
the explosion took place.

Ill

THE REFORMATION AND ITS IMMEDIATE
CONSEQUENCES

"IT TE have seen how the Middle Ages declined on
VV their spiritual side and how the clerical organiza-
tion, that is, the temporal structure of the Church, was
becoming ossified and ceasing to function properly, was
raising opposition of every kind, was provoking the
anger of those who felt they were not being spiritually
fed ; the anger of those who contrasted the spiritual
functions for which endowment had been made with
the characters of those who received the incomes of
those endowments. We have noted the spiritual starva-
tion of great numbers of the laity, the absence of predica-
tion, and so forth.

We have seen how it was inevitable that under such
conditions specific heresies should arise, and that, since
the growing quarrel was specially a quarrel with the
clerical organization of the Church (that is, with the
monasteries, with the parish endowments and those of
the cathedral Sees and Bishoprics, with pluralities, or the
holding of many endowments by one person, and so
forth), the main heresies arose upon the point of hier-
archical authority and the special claims and position
of the whole Church organization. The rising flood
was essentially an anti-clencal tide, and therefore the
heresies took the form of attacking the powers and claims
of the priesthood and of the Papacy, which was the
summit and coping stone of the whole clerical body.

Hence the heresies growing strong in the XIVth
century protested that the Sacraments could not be
validly administered nor even the Host consecrated save
by priests in the state of grace. There were heresies
denying the right of the Church and its various organiza-
tions— the monasteries, etc. — to hold property at all.
There were heresies especially attacking once more, at
hi

ii2 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

first somewhat timidly, the doctrine of the Real Presence,
for it was the power of the priest to consecrate this which
was at the basis of his special sacred position — and against
this was protest arising. In general, there was a spirit
of anti-unity abroad, and it was exasperated by the
dilatory policy of the authorities in the Church. There
was a perpetual cry for a reform, for a thorough cleansing
of the whole society, for a return to the great virtues
which had marked the earlier Middle Ages. But nothing
sufficient was done until it was too late.

It is nearly always so in the great catastrophes of
mankind. There is nearly always ample warning. There
are many and even violent preliminary shocks like the
preliminary shocks of a great earthquake or volcanic
eruption. They incommode and even frighten those
whose position or privileges are threatened. But they
hardly ever sufficiently incommode or frighten them to
spur them into necessary action. Hence also that
religious “ Reign of Terror.” The growing rebellion
was met by lawyers’ tricks, by the use of force, by con-
tinued and often fearful punishments, but not by that
spiritual change, that repentance which the times
demanded.

A special instance of what was going on will illustrate
all this better than generalities :

One of the chief grievances which raised men’s anger
against the organization of the Church was the payment
of mortuaries — that is, dues payable upon death. When a
man died, such and such a unit of the clerical organization
had the right of burying him and of collecting the dues
which followed upon his death. For instance, the parish
would ordinarily have the right to bury him, and who-
ever owned the parish dues (which in the course of time
had become immensely complicated — various forms of
tithes, etc., fees payable on particular occasions and all
the rest of it) would collect funeral dues from the
family after the funeral. But apart from that there
were payments in kind at a death which varied with
different places and with local customs. In some places

THE REFORMATION

”3

the mortuary took the form of appropriating the most
valuable individual object discoverable in the dead man’s
house, a jewel, for instance, or a good piece of furniture,
or a good horse from his stable. In practice, of course,
the thing was compounded for, since payment was made
to redeem it, but the whole system was irritating and
the exasperation was all the greater because it no longer
corresponded to anything real in the organization of
Society. It appeared no more than a senseless tax for
swelling the already huge revenues of the clergy at the
expense of the laity.

These mortuaries might have been compounded,
bought up by public arrangement and gradually ex-
tinguished ; but those who benefited by them were too
numerous and the customs attached to them too diverse
for any common action to be taken. The governments
of the various parts of Christendom had only local
powers over temporal affairs ; the Church affairs and the
Church reforms were something quite separate. Civil
government could not touch them and the complaints,
however violent, could find no appreciable redress from
the king and his laws.

In connection with all this we can understand the
bitter feeling that had arisen on another matter, the
power of the ecclesiastical courts.

The ecclesiastical courts had appeared with the con-
version of Europe. Under the simple conditions of the
early Middle Ages they dealt mainly with the trial of
cases purely spiritual. They were presided over by the
Bishop or his deputies, not by the civil officers of the
community. They inquired into heresies, they dealt
with matrimonial cases, with wills, with dues payable to
ecclesiastical bodies. Their decisions were naturally in
favour of increasing as much as possible the revenues
drawn by the clerical side of Society from laymen ; they
had become in the corruption of the later Middle Ages
engines too often used for extortion. It was always an
advantage to the ecclesiastical lawyers and ecclesiasti-
cal judges to discover cases of heresy or spiritual

i H CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

misdemeanour in order to increase revenue by fines and
the rest, as also to increase the power of their own
organizations.

A famous case was that of Hunn, an important London
citizen, who tacked on to the vernacular translation of
the Scriptures a preface denouncing, among other things,
forms of revenue whereby the Papacy benefited, especially
indulgences. He was arrested and held in the prisons of
the Bishop of London, and there his body was found
dead. He probably died a natural death, but seeing how
tempers were exasperated at the time there was rumour,
of course, of suicide and even of murder. That is only
one instance, and an extreme one ; but it will serve to
explain the increasing ill ease under which Christendom
then lived.

At the same time, men began to lose their respect for
their ecclesiastical superiors. I have given instances of
how the Church at the end of the Middle Ages would
foster such a feeling. The Church had originated as an
instrument of divine persuasion, it had flourished by its
power of conversion and edification. When its human
instruments began to give so much repeated scandal it
was in peril of subversion.

In other words, a pile of gunpowder had been accumu-
lating; at any moment a match might be set to the
train and an explosion would follow in which the unity
of Christendom would be destroyed.

The decisive moment might have fallen at almost any
time in the last 150 years of the Middle Ages from the
days of Wycliffe and then of Huss to the end of the
XVth century. As a fact, the moment which accidentally
proved the origin of the final break-up fell in the later
part of the year 1517, when an eloquent man of confused
mind but great energy, an Augustinian monk called
Martin Luther, proposed to debate in the University
of Wittenberg the whole theory of indulgences.

The occasion was the offering of indulgences through-
out Germany accompanied by a demand for alms. Much
of the money so gathered was to be used for the new

THE REFORMATION 115

building of St. Peter’s in Rome ; much for the recoup-
ments of speculators. But the occasion was accidental.
In the temper of the moment almost anything might
have produced catastrophe.

All Germany was filled with a violent tumult. In
Spain and France, where the indulgence had not been
preached or travelled, the emotions were less strong,
but among the Germans there was a fever of excitement.
It was partly due, of course, to the new national and
racial feelings which had been growing as the unity of
the Middle Ages decayed. It was partly an emphasis
on the contrast between the German and the Italian.
It was in the main an anarchic, diverse, loud, confused
protest, not possessed of any positive principle save an
attack upon the general principle of unity and upon the
hierarchical organization of the Church : particularly,
therefore, an attack upon the claims to authority of
the Pope.

As a mere negative heretical movement wherein a mass
of divergent and even contradictory opinions had free
play, the movement might have been less destructive.
But there was a driving power behind it which was of
very great effect ; the opportunity for loot.

Here were these great monastic establishments, the
numbers enjoying which had dwindled, while their
revenues had been maintained.

The Papacy was the central authority. Deny the
authority of the Papacy and the vast wealth of the
Church lay defenceless before attack and spoliation.

Such attack followed almost immediately upon the
first years of the great revolt. Certain of the Swiss
cantons and the more or less independent small secular
princes especially in the north of Germany, certain of
the Free Cities, as they were called (that is, the mercantile
corporations of the trading towns), these and even local
squires and petty lordlings fell upon the endowments of
religious houses and of parishes, of Sees and all forms of
clerical income, swelling their own fortunes out of the
proceeds. It may be imagined what a temptation lay

n6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

before all those men not restrained by a governmental
power above them, to indulge this orgy of loot.

Nevertheless, it may fairly be said that the explosion
would not have had a permanent effect but for the
appearance, about ten years after the first Lutheran
protest, of a book — and behind that book a mind — which
was to dominate all the future of the rebellion against
Catholic unity.

It was a book from the pen of a certain northern
Frenchman, by name Jean Cauvin, Calvin, or Chauvin,
in the Latin Calvinus, whom his followers of English
speech now know everywhere as John Calvin. He it
was who erected a counter-Church well organized and
defined and therefore capable of expansion and endurance.
He set up as the foundation of that church a surely
developed, well expounded and fully argued philosophical
system which is still so well known as to need no special
description here. It is enough to say that he recognized
only one will in the universe — the Divine Will — that he
tended, therefore, to ascribe not only good, but evil,
operations to that Will and emphasized the Divine
Majesty so strongly as to get the right relations of God
to man out of proportion ; that he weakened in man —
one may say virtually denied — the power of free will,
stressing out of reason (but with powerful effect) the
role of predestination. Man’s good deeds proceeding
from no free will were of no effect towards the salvation
of man’s soul. Inspired by this general doctrine was to
be organized a new Church which was actually the
creation of Calvin’s mind.

Here was something very different from the German
anarchy of opinion and discipline. What Calvin did
was to build, and the thing he built was a strong, highly-
organized rational fully doctrinal counter-Church, des-
tined to supplant and destroy the old Church. Calvin
not only established the soul of protestantism in definable
and therefore lasting form, but also gave protestantism
the only structure it ever had.

There were two main features in the scheme planned

THE REFORMATION 117

and erected by this great man, which features have had
a most profound effect upon the modem world.

The first of these features was the conception of
representation clothed with authority. The second was
the social doctrine of wealth. Calvin is, on the one side,
the father of the parliamentary falsehood which has
taken so long to die — indeed it still lives today in places
a sort of struggling life — and on the other hand he is
the spiritual father of what may be called “ the modem
gospel of wealth,” the idea that a man’s value, even his
spiritual value, is connected with his power to accumulate
money. How strong these two ideas have been in the
modem world, how they came to their maximum effect
during the XIXth century, we are all here to witness.

To take the political effect of Calvin first : —

Calvin conceived a scheme of self-government. The
units of his scheme, the individual churches, elected
their chiefs who were then competent to meet in
assemblies and to decide on church discipline and the
rule of faith. But the chiefs, or ministers, once elected, had
authority over their electors. Therein lies the whole
principle of parliamentarism, a parody or cheating false
image of democracy : a trick for making men think that
they are governing themselves, a fallacy into which it is
very easy for men to fall, regarding the representative
as though he were identical with the represented. We
all know into what an atmosphere of political falsehood
this root error led the nations of the XIXth century. We
know still better today why and how the thing broke down.

So much for the political creation of Calvin : now for
his social effect.

The social effect of Calvin herein is indirect, but none
the less strong. In denying the efficacy of good deeds
and of the human will, of abnegations, in leaving on one
side as useless all the doctrine and tradition of Holy
Poverty, Calvin opened the door to the domination of
the mind by money. St. Thomas had said it centuries
before — that if men abandoned the idea of God as the
supreme good they would tend to replace Him by the

1 1 8 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

idea (implicit, not directly stated, but of high practical
effect) that material wealth is the supreme good. Calvin
never said in so many words, and indeed, never thought,
that men should principally pursue the accumulation of
wealth, but he broke down the barriers which Catholicism
had erected against that perilous force, and, following
on his action, Christendom began to turn to the idea of
wealth as at least the only certain good, and therefore
the main thing to be aimed at.

Calvin himself would have said with learning, sincerity,
and zeal that the glory of God was the only object worthy
of human activity, but as he divorced such activity from
the power of saving the individual soul, what could there
remain save the pursuit of riches ?

Calvin began his predication in his native France and
there issued his first appeal in the shape of a strong letter
to the French king. Attacked at once as heretical, he
joined the Swiss reformers and became the master of the
independent republic of Geneva, with which town his
name will always be specially connected.

It is to be remembered that his first movement against
the orthodox Church and its hierarchy began in a family
quarrel. His father had been the wealthy lawyer who
looked after the affairs of the diocese of Noyon, a very
rich royal Bishopric north-east of Paris. He was accused
to the Bishop and his chapter of embezzling the funds
that passed through his hands and asked to deliver his
accounts. He refused and was excommunicated. Young
John Calvin himself, the son for whom his father had
bought a block of clerical revenue, was despoiled of it on
account of the quarrel and was the more angry with the
local clerical authorities. But it would be unjust and
bad history to make this original dispute, though there
was involved in it a money question (which always
embitters every quarrel), the main cause of Calvin’s
rebellion. It was the occasion for that rebellion, but not
the motive power thereof.

When we survey the effect of Calvin over the general
body of Christendom, we find that France became the

THE REFORMATION 119

battlefield for the triumph or defeat of Calvin’s system.
Its military quality and its precision appealed to Calvin’s
fellow-countrymen, and for a lifetime the leaders of the
French nation were first of all divided and finally
engaged in the most violent civil conflict to decide
whether Calvinism should or should not direct the future
of the nation.

The town of Paris turned the scale. Paris was intensely
devoted to the tradition of Catholicism and compelled
the Calvinist leader (who was also the heir to the throne,
Henry of Navarre) at the end of the civil wars to accept
Catholicism. But the Calvinists under the name of
Huguenots remained vigorous and numerous — more than
half the higher nobility of France and the great mass of
squires, many also of the wealthy middle class, the
population of certain seaports, and even groups of
peasantry, especially in the mountain districts such as
the Cevennes. The ferment of Huguenotry — that is, of
Calvinism — worked in the body of the nation. It was
to produce later on among the Catholics themselves the
movement known as Jansenism, and in the long run it
may be found at the root of the scepticism which became
so strong at the end of the XVIIth and grew through
the XVIIIth century. It is also at the root of the
strong anti-Catholic political and social feeling which
was long of such powerful effect upon the French mind
and still divides the nation bitterly.

In England Calvinism was of no such effect. Although
in Scotland it swept the field, in England the authorities
were reluctant to accept its political and clerical structure.
Calvinism did produce now, even in England, the large
and enthusiastic minority of Puritans who had such

Swer in the earlier XVIIth century, two lifetimes after
Ivin’s death, but it never wholly occupied the English
as it did the Scottish mind.

What separated England from Catholic unity was no
enthusiasm for the Calvinist system, but the vested
interest which the wealthier class in England soon had
in supporting the Reformation doctrines ; it was because

/

izo CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

that classed received the loot of the monasteries and
other clerical endowment, as we shall see later on, that
England as a whole was shepherded, slowly and reluct-
antly, into the anti-Catholic fold.

Among the Germans there was division. The main
Reformation movement among the Germans was not
'■Calvinist, it was Lutheran, occupied with local indepen-
dence much more than with fixed and defined doctrine,
directed against the central authority of the empire
(already badly weakened) much more than towards any
new Church or accepted system of doctrine.

In general you may say that, after the explosion, the
spiritual ruins of what had been Christendom lay in
three sets. In one, Catholic tradition had been
maintained in spite of the storm. Society pulled itself
together, tightened up the bonds of Church discipline,
and did all the work we associate with the Council of
Trent. The Emperor at Vienna, the French monarchy,
remained Catholic. Against them was a smaller but
advancing Protestant Europe, principally of the north
(but counting a powerful faction in France), having for
its chief political centre the new Protestant government
of England. And that Protestant culture thus arising
was divided into two groups. The Calvinist with its
strict organization kept what may be called the essence
of Protestantism alive. Side by side with it, less definite,
equally anti-Catholic, but for political rather than
doctrinal reasons, lay the German Lutherans and the
new English Church organization which retained many
ecclesiastical titles of the old Catholic world, but had
definitely adopted the Protestant ethic and was now
ranged against the remains of Catholic Europe.

What I have called “ the explosion,” that sudden
break-up and change for which the common name is the
Reformation (the resolving of the increasing strain under
which the last of medieval society had fallen at the very
end of the Middle Ages), produced revolutionary results
in every department of human life.

THE REFORMATION izi

The whole of European Christian society was both
shaken and transformed. What had been for centuries
a Christian and therefore satisfactory equilibrium in
human relations gradually developing a free peasantry in
the place of the old slave-state, ordering by rule and
custom the economic structure of Society, regarding men
as connected by status rather than by contract, guarding
against excessive competition, insistent upon stability,
disappeared as a result of the mighty shock delivered m
the early XVIth century. There came in the place of
the old stable medieval civilization which had latterly
grown increasingly unstable, and in place of the old
social philosophy which for centuries had satisfied
mankind, a new state of affairs the various parts of which
developed at various rates, but all of which combined
came, in the long run, to form the modem world and
those conditions from which we are only now emerging :
a social state based upon unbridled competition, one
eliminating the old idea of status, regarding only contract
as sacred, and presenting towards its close that
phenomenon of industrial capitalism the revolt against
which now threatens to destroy us all.

Let it be remembered that all the while the material
side of civilization was advancing ; a wider knowledge
of the physical world through the advance of science and
geographical discovery, a more critical spirit applied to
history and documents, sacred and profane, an intellectual
“ clearing,” as it has been called, went side by side with
the breakdown of all by which Christians had hitherto
lived.

That paradox must always be borne in mind as we
follow those effects of the change which medieval
Catholic society (and, for that matter, most men by this
time) would deplore.

For while we were losing what was spiritually of the
highest value, we were gaining on the material side
constantly in a continuous advance which has not reached
its limit even today. The power of man over nature, his
knowledge of the external detail, at least (though not of

122 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the inward nature), of the world to which he belongs,
were all on an ascending grade, even as the philosophy
on which he had so long reposed was failing him. If we
forget these material advantages which grew side by side
with the spiritual decline, we shall get our general view
out of proportion and fail to understand why many men,
perhaps most men, still regard the transformation of
Europe, in spite of the perils into which it has at last led
us, as an advantage to the race.

Let us consider the effects of that great transformation
in two successive aspects — the political and the economic
— and take those aspects in that order, dealing with the
political first and the economic last.

This is indeed to reverse the order which almost all
men of the XIXth century and most men today would
follow. For in the XIXth century it was taken for
granted that economic phenomena in society, that is,
the way in which wealth is produced, distributed and
exchanged, were the causes of political change, and even
today many men of the older generation still cling to
that conception.

But the conception is false ; political change invariably
comes prior to economic change ; economic change could
not take place but for the acceptation of laws and a
machinery of government which allows the new economic
conditions to function. First comes, in every great
revolution of European affairs, a spiritual change ; next,
bred by this, a change in social philosophy and therefore
in political arrangement ; lastly, the economic change
which political rearrangement has rendered possible.

There were two political conceptions facing each other
after the unity of Christendom had been shattered by
the Reformation : That which clung to the memory of
the old common European State called Christendom ;
and a new idea that each district or realm should enjoy
absolute independence and each have the power to make
laws applicable to all its citizens, without any interference
from a superior moral power common to all Europe.

The old ideal of unity in Christendom had been

THE REFORMATION 123

expressed through two main institutions, the Empire
and the Papacy; the first obviously and explicitly
political, the second belonging rather to the general
transcendental scheme of Catholicism, but having its
political place in the structure of the European world.

Unity through an Empire and a common Imperial
idea, the ideal of all Christendom acting under one civil
authority in civil matters, had been a reality at the
moment when the Graeco-Roman Empire accepted the
Catholic Faith. It remained an active reality in the
Greek East throughout whatever territories were directly
administered from Byzantium, and the Emperor in
Byzantium was the real ruler of a centralized state.

But in the West, although the conception of Empire
remained strong, though men still thought of all political
power as ultimately deriving from the Emperor, yet in
practice local government superseded the central
authority of the universal monarch. We have seen how
that local government fell under the control of generals
commanding portions of the Roman troops : the
federated auxiliary portions largely of German but also
of Slav blood, semi-barbaric, though Christian and thus
part of our civilization.

These local commanders (the most important of whom
by far was the chief ruler in Gaul, who had originally
been the commander of the small Frankish contingent
of Roman troops) were to be found also in Italy and
Spain. In Great Britain, as the Dark Ages advanced,
government had almost broken down. There was no
one local general nor even three or four arranging affairs
between them. Most of the British Bishoprics (the
survival of which was a test of civilization) disappeared
on the east of the island. But on the Continent, though
we were sinking into the Dark Ages, these local govern-
ments were strong ; and they maintained not only the
law courts, but the social traditions and even the coins
and currency of the Imperial state. There had been an
effort to re-establish for the West, as a separate unit, an
Imperial power of its own. The thing had been done

124 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

under Charlemagne during that great siege of Christen-
dom of which we have spoken. But the thing did not
last. As the Dark Ages proceeded to their lowest depth
in the IXth century, after Charlemagne’s death and the
break-up of his dominions, there was no real imperial
rule left north of South Italy or west of the Adriatic.

Yet the name “ Empire ” and the idea of Empire
survived in the West. It was taken over, oddly enough,
by the heads of the newly converted German tribes who
claimed through the Imperial name and title the right
to exercise some authority over North Italy and even in
some degree over the districts to the west of the German
speech, the marches between that speech and the Latin
speech of Gaul. But by the end of the Middle Ages
the word Emperor meant in practice no more than the
hereditary house of Hapsburg, ruling its personal domains
from Vienna ; claiming, but hardly exercising, a general
authority over the German-speaking divisions, free cities
and lesser and greater lordships.

The Papacy survived, of course, far more strongly ; but
against the Papacy also there had come — indeed it was
the essence of the Reformation period — a violent protest
and rebellion. As against the political conception of a
civil unity under a more or less shadowy Western Emperor
there was put forward the theory of the absolute state ;
each prince, or government of a free city or free canton,
supreme in his or its own area.

After the religious wars following on the Reformation,
the principle was even accepted that the type of religion
adopted by the government of each district should rule
the spiritual life of all inhabitants thereof.

The acceptance of such an idea confirmed, of course,
the political disruption, following on the religious
disruption. The effect of this was to permit new civil
laws governing social relations, which laws were not
subject to the general opinion or the traditions of
Christendom.

Here it is that we see the priority of the political over
economic circumstances. Only where the political revolu-

THE REFORMATION 125

tion had been thorough and the government of a district
had become supreme and independent of all external
authority, was it possible for that government to seize
goods hitherto under the protection of the Church. And
wherever such complete independence prevailed, the
clerical goods were seized in whole or in part. The monas-
teries and nunneries were dissolved. Their wealth was
taken wholly away for the benefit of those in power.
The endowment of parish churches, Bishoprics, Chapters,
which could not be totally destroyed, lest all forms of
corporate religion should cease (and for that men were not
prepared), were not wholly confiscated. But they were
cut down more and more as time proceeded. The
educational endowments went the same way; many
ceased altogether to be used for educational purposes,
having been grasped by any who had the power to take
them and turned to private uses, making of what had
been corporate property the personal income of the con-
fiscators. Many more were re-endowed upon a lesser
scale, so that the schools went on, though less wealthy
than before. The funds of the guilds which were
connected with local religious practices were somewhat
diminished ; and to show how violent was the spirit of
rapine, even the endowments of hospitals for the sick
largely went the same way.

It is of interest to note how the various parts of
Christendom reacted to this political change and its
economic consequences. In England, by what was no
more than a personal accident the monasteries were
seized altogether by the Crown. Within four years of
the breach with Rome (that is, of the denial of Papal
authority), every monastery and nunnery in England
had gone. And all those great revenues passed from the
hands of the corporate owners, monastic and collegiate,
first to the government and very soon to those who
were granted the rents on very favourable terms (about
half price), from the government in its pressing desire to
raise revenue.

The same thing happened, though less violently than in

126 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

England, in Scandinavia and in the northern part of the
Low Countries, which was later to be called Holland.
In Scotland there was, of course, a similar confiscation,
drastic and universal. Certain of the Swiss cantons had
led the movement. Many of the free cities and lesser
lords of Germany followed suit. But England was the
only considerable political unit which joined in the
general seizure of Church revenues.

The greater part of Europe and its chief governments,
the Imperial domains in Germany, the French monarchy,
the newly consolidated Spanish monarchy with its vast
possessions beyond the Atlantic, the Italian States, as they
preserved their allegiance to the Papacy, so they pre-
served the collegiate rights and the monastic establish-
ments, schools, hospitals and the rest.

While all this was going on a great deal depended
upon the attitude of Calvin. We have seen how Calvin
was the major influence giving positive structure and
permanence to the new Reformation movement. Cal-
vinism provided the framework of and gave its spirit to
this new Protestant world. And as Calvinism was the
creation of Calvin, his attitude towards the economic
change is of the first importance.

Now that attitude was ambiguous. Although Calvin
was the least compromising of men, as direct as he was
energetic and creative, he was compelled by the nature
of his position and by his very doctrines to unite two
contradictory principles.

On the one hand he denied the right of the lay power
to immix itself at all in the government of spiritual
matters. It should therefore have followed that the lay
power could have no opportunity for looting Church
property. Church property ought logically, in Calvin’s
scheme, to have been taken over by his own new counter-
Church, wherever this prevailed, and should have served
for the endowment of activities admitted or created by
his new clerical organization. The all-important in-
fluence of Calvin and Calvinism ought therefore logically
to have worked against the looting of Church property.

5 THE REFORMATION 127

But Calvin and his followers were also rooted in
another principle and occupied in another activity ; the
principle that no central authority could be admitted
over the Church, on which account Calvinism had
attacked the Papacy with special vehemence. Now the
power of the Pope alone (as head of the Catholic organi-
zation on its spiritual side) restrained that otherwise
complete independence which the free cities, the princes,
and cantons vehemently affirmed. There remained
therefore no alternative for Calvin but to affirm with the
utmost clarity and insistence the independence of each
civil power. He, more than any other one influence,
made secure the new conception of absolute local or
national sovereignty, unchecked by the general powers
and traditions of Christendom. Hence he it was who let
loose an unrestricted power of confiscation and loot over
what had been the property of the universal clerical
organization of Christendom, although none affirmed
more clearly than he the rightful independence of clerical
institutions from civil control.

In the upshot, then, the practical influence of Calvin
was to make the loot of the Church wherever his influence
was felt, not only possible, but a matter of course.

When we come to look in more detail at the economic
effects of the great change, we find them proceeding from
the victory of one philosophy over its opposite.

Under the old social philosophy which had governed
the Middle Ages, temporal, ana therefore all economic,
activities were referred to an eternal standard. The
production of wealth, its distribution and exchange were
regulated with a view to securing the Christian life of
Christian men. In two points especially was this felt :
First, in securing the independence of the family, which
can only be done by the wide distribution of property ; in
other words, the prevention of the growth of a proletariat.
Secondly, in the close connection between wealth and
public function. Under the old philosophy which had
governed the high Middle Ages things had been every-
where shaped for a condition of Society in which property

128 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

was well distributed throughout the community, and
thus the family rendered independent. The slave was
slowly becoming the serf, and from the serf becoming
a free peasant. The artisan in the towns, organized in
his guild, had control of his own life and that of his
family. He was not, as he has now become, the economic
subordinate of wealthier men. His relations with his
apprentices were organic and domestic, unlike the modern
relation of mere mechanical contract between the labourer
and the capitalist who exploits him.

That there would be and were large exceptions to all
this is manifest ; that there were already not a few,
through a small minority, who had neither land for
tillage nor a house of their own, nor a place in a guild, is
true. But these were not numerous enough to give
the tone to Society. The society of Christendom and
especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion,
which we call the Reformation, had been a society of
owners, the vast majority of them small owners : a
Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there re-
mained strong bonds between one class and another, and
in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior,
but not in the main, a distinction between a restricted
body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the
mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become.
It has so become through the action of the Reformation,
which is at the root of the whole change from economic
freedom to capitalism.

To begin with, every time a piece of collegiate property,
such as a monastery, a hospital or a school, was looted,
the profits and rents of one man replaced the livelihood
of a whole community. The monks who had formed
the units of their society lived on in some places upon
pensions, and in others were cast upon the world. But
in neither case were they succeeded by another body
of corporate owners. In the place of such corporate
owners appeared in due time a number of destitute men.

The suppression of the guilds, or, at any rate, their
weakening, worked in the same way. The economic

THE REFORMATION

129

foundations of the guild were shaken by the religious
upheaval, because the guild had been inextricably mixed
up with religious observance ; the Reformation im-
poverished the guilds, undermined their moral authority
and, in the long run, after some generations when its
full effect had been felt, the guild dwindled to be a
“ museum piece ” : an anachronism, of which the name
had been kept, but a totally new function attributed to it.
Thus what were once the guilds of the City of London
had become by the XIXth century dining clubs for rich
men, clubs usually endowed with landed and other
property. They used many useful functions in the way
of education and charities, succouring their impoverished
members and dependents, but no longer resembling in
any real way the old guilds from which they had sprung.
The original Fishmongers’ Guild of London regulated
the trade in fish, fixed prices, checked undue competition,
prevented the wealthier fishmonger from eating up his
smaller brother and so on. There is still to this day a
Fishmongers’ Guild, or Company, as it was and is called,
immensely wealthy and giving great banquets in its fine
modern hall — the successor of the medieval building
destroyed in the Great Fire of London. But it has
no vital connection with the trade of fishmongering ; it
is rather a collection of well-to-do merchants and others
who have asked for membership and paid their entrance
fee, and thus form the present Fishmongers’ Company.*

The Reformation has been called in a biting epigram
“ a rising of the rich against the poor.” Like all epi-
grams, that brief statement is exaggerated, but it contams
much more truth than most of its kind. It was from the
destruction of the unity of Christendom in the XVIth
century that there proceeded by various channels those
developments which we shall trace in later pages.

Out of them combined came capitalism ; the division of

* One of the la*t of the true guild* mil performing tome shadow of it* ancient
function wai the Innholder*, of which the pretent writer u a member. If he
l* not mmahrn the lait active function it exerated, the keeping and regulation
of hotel*, etc., within the bound* of the City of London, was destroyed by law
rather more than a hundred year* ago.

130 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Society as a whole into a minority of owners, exploiting
a majority of citizens without ownership ; the control of
industry by organs of credit ; the control of those organs
of credit by yet smaller numbers of very wealthy men ;
the powerful and secret organization of such financial
control : the increasing insecurity and insufficiency of
livelihood among the masses ; at last their threat of
revolt — and through that threat of revolt the peril now
overhanging all our civilization. The Reformation con-
firmed and in many departments monstrously increased
evils already apparent in the later Middle Ages. Status,
which had guaranteed a man’s livelihood, was replaced by
contract. Usury was let loose upon the largest scale until
it became universal. Competition was allowed to run
riot until it covered nearly the whole field of man’s
actions. Banking, based upon usury, and larger and
larger commercial units based upon competition, con-
tinued the process. By the latter part of the XVIIth
century, when the second lifetime after the catastrophe
had matured, men’s minds had changed. Central
banks were at work. The proletarian spirit had arisen
in some districts, notably in England, even upon the land
itself, where the peasantry was in process of being
destroyed. The greater man was eating up the smaller
man in commerce.

When on such a world there came the new machinery
and the new rapidity of communications, all social
instruments for the checking of capitalist power had been
destroyed. This power so grew that by the end of the
XVIIIth century capitalism was already in full flood, and
became in the XlXth century all-powerful. Against it
the unfortunate and increasing proletariat was becoming
conscious of its misery, groping towards an organization
and preparing for revolt. It was inevitable that such an
inhuman state of affairs should lead to the catastrophic
instability from which we are suffering today.

But why, it may be asked, was there no return ? Why
was there not a sufficient reaction against dangers so
apparent, real and swelling ? It was because with the

THE REFORMATION 13 1

Reformation there had also disappeared not only in the
societies which broke away from Christian unity, but in
the others as well, the old mental attitude called “Faith.”

By this is not meant that the Faith disappeared — that
is, the acceptation of the authority and doctrines of the
Catholic Church — manifestly this did not disappear, save
under governments which had broken with the unity of
Christendom ; and even under these governments large
bodies of citizens remained fighting a rearguard action
(as in England and Holland) and maintaining for genera-
tions a dwindling minority of Catholic resistance.
Neither does it mean that all the prime doctrines which a
united Christendom had held were abandoned in the
Protestant areas. On the contrary, certain of the old
doctrines were still almost universally held, for instance,
those of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Others were
still virtually held by the whole of Christian people, such
as the immortality of the soul and the eternity of blessed-
ness and its opposite after death. The quality of Faith,
which may be defined as certitude in things not demon-
strable by direct experience or deductive proof, remained.
But it remained in isolated groups ; it did not remain
as a universal habit native to all men of our blood, taken
for granted, and ruling their lives.

Because there had arisen such permanent diversity in
the morals affirmed and the doctrinal statements on which
those morals were founded, there had arisen at the same
time an underlying, unexpressed feeling that life could
not be conducted upon any general norm common to the
whole of our civilization. There was no longer one
Society bound by one moral bond, represented by one
moral head, expressing itself in one liturgy and able, as
only a personality can, to react against that which
threatened its existence. Local resistance there would
be, as against the break-up of the family through divorce,
as against excessive competition, etc. ; though it was kept
up with dwindling energy. It was so kept up, of course,
longer in the Catholic sections of Europe than in the
non-Catholic ; but everywhere the whole Society of

132 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Christendom was infected by this loss of unity, producing
as its inevitable fruit the loss of all capacity for co-
ordinated resistance to the growing spiritual evils now
upon it.

Those spiritual evils, working in alliance with a vastly
expanding knowledge of the material world, could not
but destroy the health of Europe in the long run. Men
were blind to the consequences of what had happened.
Even those living in the healthier parts of Christendom,
which remained Catholic, did not understand. They
were not awake to the forces which would produce
certain inevitable necessary consequences. Today those
consequences are upon us. The whole structure of our
life is in peril of immediate ruin.

Here we leave the statement of the great upheaval
and its immediate consequences, economic and political.
We turn next to those separate developments as pro-
ceeding from the break-up of unity — the effect of un-
checked greed through Usury, through the mechanization
of life, and the rest. We shall see how, under the
intolerable strain, a Social Revolution was at first con-
fusedly proposed and at last definitely formulated, and
how the final fruit of the affair, today called Com-
munism, matured.

IV

THE ULTIMATE CONSEQUENCES OF THE
REFORMATION

(A)

GROWTH OF THE PROLETARIAT AND HENCE OF CAPITALISM

HITHERTO we Lave followed the founding and
development of our civilization, its high moment
in the true Middle Ages ; the peril it ran at the end of
the Middle Ages ; the final crash of the Reformation,
in which for a moment all appeared lost.

We have also followed the more immediate results
of that catastrophe, particularly of the loot of the Church
and the inroads made upon communal and corporate life.

So far also we have followed the process more or less
historically ; that is, consecutively from the old pagan
dap through their conversion and the formation of
Christendom to its violent disruption at the end of
1500 years.

Now we turn to another method. We shall follow
each development of the catastrophe separately, showing
how one element after another went on its way reacting
on and reacted upon by other developments side by side
with it. We shall trace, one after the other, the main
tendencies flowing from the original breakdown, and
show how at last they converged into the present
perilous situation which I have called “ The Crisis of
Civilization.” Only when we shall have followed each
of these tendencies produced by the Reformation shall
we regard their general convergence. We shall then
turn to the last section. We shall face the threat of
general destruction, a threat due to the inhuman and
godless mechanism of modern life and the violent reaction
of the oppressed. Thence we may judge the proposed
solutions of the problem. And consider the medicine
for the mortal evils now upon us.

For the Reformation as a catastrophe I have used the
135

1 36 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

simile of an explosion. I spoke of its immediate results
as one would speak after an explosion, of the clouds of
smoke and dust, the ruins, the roar, and the rest. Thus
I emphasized the loot of the Church, the breakdown
of any common international authority and standard for
keeping Christendom together, the huge wars which
were let loose, and, in the loss of unity, loss of faith.

Now that we come to the slow and ultimate results,
we must change the simile and I compare the matter
no longer to an explosion but rather to the breaking down
of a dam which restrains a great head of water.

The simile is just, for before the Reformation broke
out there had accumulated a strain just like a head of
water of increasing pressure, against which artificial re-
pression would sooner or later prove useless. The dam
broke ; the flood poured tumultuously over all the lower
lands. After the first chaos of swirling torrent and
deeply flooded land, the waters begin to take particular
channels ; they wander by diverse ways through the
countryside below the place where the original dam
stood ; at last they tend to converge, they form a new
accumulation. Once more tension arises, once more the
danger of catastrophe is apparent. But there is this
difference between the catastrophe of which we now
stand in peril and the catastrophe of the Reformation.
After the Reformation our civilization survived, indeed
its technical performances increased. Its spiritual loss
was disastrous and was bound to produce at last what it
has produced — the danger of death for the whole. But
in the material world, what followed on the catastrophe
was at first a continual and at last a rapid expansion
and advance. This was particularly so in the field of
physical science and the discovery of the earth. But
today what threatens us through the loss of religion is
the total collapse of Society and with it the corresponding
loss of all the arts and sciences — the end of our civilization.

These ultimate results of the Reformation, these
streams of tendency which we can follow down, each
in its own channel separately, from that one source, “ the

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION ijjy

bursting of the dam,” I shall treat of under the following
heads : f

First, the replacement of Status by Contract. This
must come at the beginning because it formed the gen/eral
condition under which all the rest was possible. It j was
because Status decayed and Contract took its place (that
all the modem development, up to these last dangerous
moments of ours today, was capable of appearing, j The
growth of Contract replacing Status was not a caujse of
the evils that followed, but it was a condition without
which they could not have come about. ^

After a survey of this main change, I shall consider
the twin results of newly invigorated greed : first Us-ury
and then Competition.

Next we will turn to the rise of a Proletariat — an
inevitable result of Competition in the absence of Status. '
After that we will turn to the new commerce and banking,
then to the effect of machines, which greatly expanded,
and at the same time degraded, the population which
served them.

After that we shall see the first protest arising against
conditions that were gradually becoming intolerable. We
shall follow the rise of various theories of Socialism, which
were the voice of that protest ; we shall see how Socialism
gathers, and lastly how, in the maturity of all this, we
get that fully defined, most powerful and active affair
called Communism.

Communism, the ultimate fruit of the Reformation, is
clearly the mortal enemy of all that by which we have
lived and by which our culture continues. Its victory
would be our death.

Having postulated the menace of Communism we
shall consider what remedies can be proposed as an
alternative to the false remedy which Communism offers.

In all this a warning is necessary, which is that what
the Reformation did was not to create the seeds of all
those evils from which we now suffer. Every one of the
features we are now about to consider — the growth of

I3|8 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Contract at the expense of Status, the presence of Usury
anil of Competition, the power of commerce and of
backing, the effect of machines — all these can be dis-
covered in some degree of growth present among us long
befdre the Reformation period. Some of them have
always been present in human society and in the nature
of things always will be.

Ni>> the novel effect of the Reformation was not the
starting or creating of any of these things but a change
in degree; ills ancient and native to human society
began, through the Reformation, to flourish out of all
measure.

Remember that it is by degree all things are charac-
terized. The difference between a caress and a deadly
blow is only a difference of degree. The difference
between the slight and genial exhilaration of a good meal
with moderate drink and the bestial and destructive thing
called drunkenness is only a question of degree. The
difference between reticence or even slight eccentricity
and madness is only a difference of degree. It was not
the mere presence of even such an evil as usury which
appeared as a novelty after the Reformation. It was
rather the running riot of that evil. It was not the
presence of a certain number of landless men and of the
destitute — that is, of a Proletariat — which was novel
after the Reformation ; it was the growth of such
numbers of these that they became the great mass of
the community. It was not the hardship of life pro-
duced by poverty which was proper to the Reformation,
it was a subservience grown to an intolerable weight ;
the insufficiency and insecurity and subjection of in-
dustrialized masses goading them to frenzy.

All this being said, let us see how Contract began to
eat up Status.

Contract Replaces Status

First of all, what is “ Status ” ? The word means
“ standing.” The status of a man is his established
condition. In our original Christian society — that society

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 139

which reached its flower in the Middle Ages — status was
omnipresent. It did not cover the whole ground of
human activity by any means, but it covered a sufficient
area to make status the determining character of all our
society. A man’s position was known, the duties and
burdens attaching to it were known, as also the ad-
vantages, and they were in a large measure fixed ; for
the spiritual force and motive underlying the whole
business was an appetite for security and for making life
tolerable on its material side so that there should be
room and opportunity for men to lead the good life, as
the Greeks put it, or, as the Catholic Church puts it,
to save their souls.

Status arose from the strong, instinctive demand of a
Catholic society for stable social relations between men,
and, what was much more important, for a stable
basis of livelihood attaching to the great mass of families
in the community. With the loss of religion Status has
almost wholly disappeared today, and nowhere more
than in the most advanced communities. Its dis-
appearance is particularly striking in modem North
America, but it is losing ground everywhere in the
mechanized world of Europe.

Under Status one man was the accepted superior of
another. Again, one man had a function attached to
him which was admitted and permanent and which dis-
tinguished him from another man with another function.

The artisan was, in the scheme of Society, below the
lord of a village, but he had full standing as a member of
his guild. The serf, who later became the peasant in
the village, was even lower than the artisan in the social
scale, but he was certain of his position, he had an
hereditary holding, and could not De rendered landless
or destitute. He had Status. Status governed the
whole arrangement of the Church, of course, but also
the main arrangements of civil society. Today there
survives of it in particular the status of offices in the
Catholic Church and certain vague and insecure
definitions in other activities. In some of the professions
J

I40 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

there is still a large element of status, notably in the
law and in medicine, still more in the armed services
of the State.

Indeed, Status is so necessary to the nature of man,
in some degree at least, that it can never die out ; but,
in so far as it can die out, it had died out in the last
phase of modem times.

Now Contract as the mam social bond between man
is the enemy of Status. Where Contract gains in
importance, Status diminishes. Even when Status was
at its highest, Contract was present. It was present
whenever one man made a purchase from another man
in a market. It was present whenever men bargained
even for an extension or development of Status itself.
There had always been contract in the matter of mer-
chandise, though restricted by the guild system, and
there was Contract in a hundred details of daily life.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, long before
Contract grew to be so important as to eat up Status,
there were arising new conditions which would favour
Contract as against Status.

There was the study of Roman Law*, which gradually
modified and began to oust the traditional popular law
of the Middle Ages. The Roman Law gave sanction to
contract, not custom. Man under Roman Law, which
was rediscovered in the Middle Ages, did not hold his
land feudally as an inherited right ; he held it by purchase
or by a will ; he was an owner, an absolute owner ; and
the whole point of ownership was the right to contract
and the duty enforceable by the State of fulfilling a
contract.

Apart from Roman Law, which was the first influence
beginning to make Contract encroach upon Status, was
the growth of oversea trade with geographic expansion.
You could restrict the profits which an individual tried
to acquire by special contracts with his neighbours, but

* Nearly all Western Law i« Roman in origin, but the term " Roman Law ”
ii specially used to distinguish the exact codes revived m the Xllth century
from the old customary laws that had grown up locally.

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 141

you could not restrict tlie contracts which made the
oversea merchant wealthy, for your corporate society
had no jurisdiction over the foreign provider of foreign
goods.

Then again, as the serf began to merge into the
peasant, Contract began to destroy Status. The medieval
peasant was less and less bound to his old co-operative
village.

The same was true of the guilds in the towns. When
the guild flourished it was ruled by the conception of the
just price, and the same idea of the guild worked through
village life by making tenure of land fixed and hereditary.
But when the guild decayed as a result of the Reformation,
when controlled industry proved unable to compete with
competitive industry, Contract rapidly took the place
of Status.

In the case of the peasant — that is, of the small,
landed man — a double process took place, which was the
more important cause. Until comparatively recent
times, the tillers of the land formed the vast majority of
the people of Christendom. In this double process, the
peasant tended either to fall to the condition of a mere
wage labourer in England, so that he lost Status altogether
and had no bond with anyone save by Contract ; he
had not even the right to remain alive. Or on the other
side, as for instance in France, the peasant, by becoming
completely independent of local rules and of a lord, also
got rid of Status, and his functions became purely
functions of Contract. But instead of falling by loss of
Status into a condition of wage slavery he rose into a
condition of ownership.

At last there came in an even more powerful influence
for the destruction of Status. This was the increasing
mobility of fortune.

In the days of Status, the great family was one that
had been wealthy for a long time. Men reposed in the
idea that such wealth was permanent, and, with the
passage of the generations, such wealth naturally bred
respect. It had a status of its own. For wealth has a

142 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

mystical effect even when it is mere temporary possession,
and that effect is vastly enhanced when the possession
stretches over a long space of time. But when wealth
was mobilized, when it became (to use another metaphor)
“ liquid,” all that changed. A family very wealthy in
one generation and ruined in the next gives no impression
of Status. Men came at last to consider only the
momentary position and to give it no particular respect.
They could envy it as they could hate it, but they
could not revere it.

With all these influences increasing throughout three
hundred years and becoming riotous today — that is,
increasing feverishly — we come to the end of a process
whereby in the loss of Status and the replacement of it
by Contract we have found chaos : a society without
bond or cement. W e have further produced an economic
state of affairs in which the condition of the mass of men
deprived of Status is desperate. That is why, in their
persistent efforts to re-establish security and sufficiency
for themselves, the modern proletariat is really expressing
and apparently beginning to satisfy an appetite for Status.

Usury and Competition

Two further consequences following on the destruction
of moral unity in Europe appear in our examination of
the road by which we came to the pass in which we now
find ourselves. These two are the direct fruits of
unchecked greed : greed working without the restraint
which had been put upon its action by the moral code
of the Catholic centuries, but which, once there was no
central authority at work, could do its utmost unchecked.

These two primary fruits of greed were Usury and
Unlimited Competition.

Through Usury there arose that simplification and
consequent centralization of credit-control which was
to be so powerful an instrument in the hands of the class
newly enriched by the loot of the Reformation ; which
Competition, no longer checked by the guild, by

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 143

customary Catholic morals and by the Catholic inspira-
tion of Society, was inevitably to produce that proletariat
whose anger with the injustice of their condition has
ended in die present menace to civilization.

Competition, working on a society which had lost the
idea of Status and had replaced it by the idea of Contract,
was to ruin the multitude of small owners and to produce
increasing masses of men subject to the mere power of
wealth, without a human bond between them and their
new masters. This power of wealth was to be accentu-
ated through the centralized control of credit, a product
of unchecked Usury. The proletariat so created became
a larger and larger part of Society, while their masters,
the capitalist owners of the means of production, became
a smaller and smaller part of Society, under the rise of
the new international commerce and of banking. This
development of Capitalism was to be later accentuated
by a new rapidity of communication and the extended
use of machinery.

At the end of the process conditions were becoming
intolerable for the mass of workers who had formerly
been economically free men but who were now half slaves.

Protest began. It was at first confusedly expressed
in various forms of Socialist theory. These various
reactions of the exploited against the exploiters matured
and gradually coalesced into full Communism, which
today proposes by a simple formula the emancipation of
the wage-slaves, but only to their own destruction and
at the same time to the destruction of our religion and
civilization.

Such is the chain of cause and effect we are now about
to follow.

Usury, to take that evil first, like the greed from
which it springs, is as old as human society. Like the
other evils proceeding from the Reformation it was not
created by the movement. We shall find in the case
of Usury, as in the case of unbridled Competition (the
force which, coupled with Usury, achieved the expansion
and enslavement of the proletariat), as likewise we have

144 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

already found in the case of Contract replacing Status,
that the seeds of the change had been sown long before
the actual disruption of Christendom took place. What
happened after the Reformation was not that these new
evils, including Usury, then appeared for the first time
but, as I have said, that they turned from exceptions
into admitted and general habits. They were accepted,
they grew, and at last came to cover the whole field
of Society.

Unlike the transformation of Status into Contract and
the undue growth of Competition, Usury was not an
evil of exaggeration but an evil in itself.

It was not only evil because it got out of proportion,
and swelled beyond due measure, as did the replacement
of Status by Contract and the practice of Competition,
but it was of its own nature a thing to be condemned and
extirpated, if possible, as a disease. It may be remarked
that it had already permeated like a mortal poison the
society of pagan antiquity at its close and was one of the
main evils under which the society of Graeco-Roman
civilization collapsed in the West, before the
Mohammedan invasion in the East.*

The morals of the Church, when the Church gradually
overcame the world and moulded a new Europe, forbade
Usury as strongly, though not with so much practical
effect, as Mohammedanism did later. Every sane philos-
ophy, every religion, had forbidden it. The Greek pagan
philosophers with Aristotle at their head denounced it ;
so did the Oriental pagans ; so did the Jewish law.

Now why was this f Why was Usury thus regarded
universally as immoral, and why has it been found in
practice to be a poison ultimately destroying Society ?

* It mutt be remarked that one of the principal factors of success m the
Mohammedan over-running of half Christendom between the Vllth and Vlllth
centuries was its active penalizing of U11117. This leading tenet of Islam m its
social morals gave immediate relief to myriads of debtors m North Africa,
Syria, and Mesopotamia. It is strictly enforced today Nothing it more
remarkable m the Mohammedan countries of North Africa today than to see how,
under the rule of Europeans there, the Mohammedan still refuses to take interest
from his fellow Mohammedan on a mere loan of money, and how the trade
of Usury it mainly confined to the European immigrants and the native Jews

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 145

In order to answer these questions we must first
understand what Usury is, in the sense in which we here
employ the term ; for there is great ambiguity in the
use of the word and therefore misunderstanding of the
thing which the word connotes.

Usury in the sense of an economic evil does not mean
the taking of interest on a loan. It does not mean the
taking of interest higher than some permitted minimum.
It means the taking of interest upon a loan of money alone
(or still worse, upon a mere promise to lend money, an
instrument of credit) whether that money be invested
soundly or no, whether it represent productive energy or
no. Usury is, properly speaking, the taking of increment
upon a loan of money merely because it is money, or worse
still, the taking of such increment upon a credit-
instrument.

The reasons for condemning interest upon money
alone, as distinguished from profit, are twofold : First,
it is asking a tribute from Society as the price of releasing
currency hitherto withheld from its proper function as
the circulating medium of exchange ; secondly, it is
enforcing a claim for payment of a share in profit which
mav, but also may not, exist.

As an example of the first evil, let us consider a market
in which the supply of currency is in the hands of a small
number of those present, buyers and sellers ; or even in
an extreme case (the case of many a bank in a small
market town) in the hands of one controller only.

No transactions in the market, save those of mere
barter, can take place unless the monopolist holding the
currency permit it to be used for its natural purpose.

The natural purpose of currency is this : the facilitation
of the multiple exchange of goods. If I have a surplus
of wheat, having produced more than I can consume of
that article, while my neighbour has a surplus of hay,
having produced more than his establishment can
consume, we will, if we are in contact, naturally exchange
the hay for the wheat ; since it is to the mutual advantage
of both of us that we should do so.

1 46 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Now let us suppose a third party, who has produced
more potatoes than he can consume, but has not sufficient
hay for his purpose ; a fourth who has livestock for food
in excess of his needs and would exchange the surplus for
wheat ; a fifth who is a craftsman and has produced
clothes and boots for the supply of others in exchange
for goods which he needs. Then there arises a condition
not of simple barter but of multiple exchange.

The man with the hay is not in contact with the man
who produced boots, nor either of them with the man
who has a surplus of potatoes. There must be present
a common medium of exchange which shall circulate
among them if the various surpluses are to be distributed
according to the demands of the producers and purchasers.

That is the true function of money, and of instruments
of credit based upon money : to make possible the action
of multiple exchange.

Now in so far as the monopolists hold back this current
medium from general circulation, demanding a price for
its use, they are demanding increment for something
which has no natural increment : which does not breed.
They are asking for a surplus although that which they
advance produces of itself no surplus. They are holding
up the community by refusing it its normal medium of
exchange.

That is the first wrong attaching to taking interest
upon money alone. The second — and in complex times
such as ours, much the more important — evil attaching
to usury is the taking of increment from a non-productive
loan.

This is manifestly immoral.

A man comes to me and says : “ I have found upon
my property a vein of ore, but it lies deep, so that I shall
require a considerable capital — say £20,000 — to extract
the valuable metal. That metal, when it shall have been
extracted, will be worth at least £40,000. But I cannot
obtain this advantage until I purchase the instruments
for developing the mine and have hired the labour
required to work it. Lend me the £20,000 necessary

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 147

for the operation.” I answer him : “ If I do so, you
must give me a share in the profit, say, half the total.”
He agrees that without my capital he could not develop
the mine ; without his ore my capital would not be used.
The combination of the two is productive of wealth, and
we share that wealth. That is a perfectly moral tran-
saction, even if the profit be one of 100 per cent, or
1,000 per cent, over the original investment ; so that if,
with my stipulated half profit, I make 50 per cent, or
500 per cent, on my original loan, I am in no way to
blame. The increment is not, properly speaking, interest
on a loan of money ; it is a share of real wealth.

But if I lend the money, saying : “ I care not what your

Profits may be, nor whether there be a profit or no, but
demand £ 2,000 a year for the use of my £20,000 ” —
then in case the speculation fails, the borrower will be
bound to pay the £2,000 perpetually, without any
production of wealth to correspond to it. He will then
be paying interest on an unproductive loan, and it is
manifestly immoral to ask for share of wealth which doe
not exist.

Now any loan at interest which is a loan of mere money
may partake of this character ; and among a number of
such loans many will partake of this unproductive
character. Of the money bearing interest merely
because it is money, some large proportion at any one
time must be demanding interest from activities which
create no wealth out of which to pay the interest.

For instance, nearly all the War Loans issued in the
belligerent countries to pay for the Great War were
loans unproductive of wealth, yet bearing interest. The
money was expended, not m developing productive
capacity, not in turning potential wealth into actual
wealth, but in feeding men occupied in killing each other,
in clothing them, in giving them their wages, and in
armament. When the effort was over, a vast indebted-
ness remained ; a vast annual interest was claimed in
perpetuity — and yet there had been no wealth produced
out of which such increment could come.

148 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

But though Usury is in itself immoral, and justly
condemned by every moral code, its chief and worst
defect in the particular case we are now examining — the
growth of Capitalism and its increasing proletariat — is
the centralization of irresponsible control over the lives
of men : the putting of power over the proletariat into
the hands of a few who can direct the loans of currency
and credit without which that proletariat cannot be
fed and clothed and maintained in work.

It is manifestly easier to make a merger in mere paper
interests, in the mere book-keeping of bankers, than it is
to make a merger of activities in real things.

One set of capitalists control a particular railway,
having certain problems to solve, and certain public needs
to serve. Another set control another railway, and have
another and different set of conditions to meet and
different needs to serve. It may be difficult to adjust
the functions of the two so that both shall come under
one control, though such a combination promises
advantages through the lessening of expense in manage-
ment. But the merger of two financial groups can be,
as it were, automatic. There is no material obstacle.
You are but arranging a profitable combination in the
common art of book-keeping. Therefore Usury, that is,
the taking of interest on an advance of money or credit
alone without consideration of whether actual wealth
shall be produced or no, tends to centralize. You get
in the long run a sort of octopus which throws its tentades
over the whole of Society. The institutions of credit
become the normal depositories of innumerable private
credits, and of collections of currency, which become the
base of further credits. Loans both for production and
for activities which will produce nothing, many such
loans so issuing from one source, all of them bearing
interest, and therefore some part of them bearing
interest on non-productive investment — that is, making a
claim for wealth which is not really there — impoverish
and deliberately destroy the debtor by putting him under
tribute to pay, though he has no source of income

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 149

produced by the sum which he borrowed. The most
familiar instance is the ruin of a farmer through
foreclosure on his mortgage by a bank.

Usury so extended throughout a community, so taken
for granted, lays the community under an unjust tribute
and at the same time becomes the central controller,
whether through productive or unproductive loans, of
most social activities.

The larger the unit of capital present, the easier the
transaction called emission of credit. Centralized lend-
ing of this kind (which is today universal) actively
promotes the absorption of the small man by the great,
the reduction of small property owners to a proletarian
condition.

It is with Usury as with other evils in Society ; apart
from its original immorality and the manifest causes
thereof, it produces secondary effects which are also evil,
until at last it has infected the whole community.

As long as Usury was forbidden by the moral law and
its immorality admitted, even though it took place widely,
it took place under protest. It was always checked by
the public disrepute in which it was held and by the fact
that, unless it were disguised, the interest could not be
recovered by law. Disguises were indeed often used,
as for instance, the promise to repay on a certain date a
certain sum of money as having been lent, when as a
fact a smaller sum had been lent. But though such
subterfuges were continual, the evil could not spread
until the taking of interest upon money alone became an
admitted practice of which no man was ashamed, which
no one thought evil, which was taken for granted.

That is precisely what happened within the space of
about two lifetimes after the Reformation first broke
down our common morals. By the third generation
great central banks * had arisen, notably in Amsterdam

* Here again, the origin* of the thing ire far older , the principle of Banking,
that u, using other people's money without their leave, enriched Lombard
dealers and German changers for generations But the handlers of credit
were not as they now are the masters of the State. Government — kingship —
was more powerful than they.

ISO CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

and London. Shortly afterwards, during the XVIIIth
century, men had everywhere begun to think (later in
Catholic societies than in Protestant, but everywhere at
last) as though interest on money were part of die nature
of things : as though money had indeed, merely as money,
a right to breed. The false doctrine was bound to lead
to a deadlock at last, and in our own time that deadlock
has been reached. The recovery of the vast usurious
loans is becoming impossible. Recourse has had to be
taken to repudiation on all sides and the whole system
is breaking down.

But remember that the worst of its effects is not its
own self-destruction, but the way in which it has gathered
into a few centres the power of controlling the lives of
the community and particularly of the proletariat,
whose employment and therefore existence, depends
upon the advance of credit by the holders of financial
power. For all our great enterprises today are possible
only through the favour of the lenders of money or credit.

We may sum up, then, and say that the unrestricted
admittance of Usury as a normal economic function about
a lifetime after the Reformation advanced the destruction
of economic freedom, the swallowing up of the small
man by the greater man, and the ultimate production of
a large destitute Proletariat in the following fashions :

(1) By the eating up of small property through Usury,
falling as it did habitually upon men already embarrassed,
and achieving their ruin ;

(2) By transferring real wealth in goods and land to
those who directly used their mere money power, often
enormous and impersonal, through mortgage and fore-
closure.

The second of the two forces let loose by the
Reformation for the ultimate destruction of economic
freedom and the production of Capitalism with its now
revolutionary proletariat was the force of Unrestricted
Competition.

Here we must be careful to note again that, unlike

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 15 1

Usury, competition is an evil only when it passes beyond
certain limits. Usury is an evil always and everywhere.
It is a moral evil in itself and of evil social effect by its
very nature. To take interest on money without
considering on what the money is spent, necessarily
involves the taking of profit on an unproductive loan.
It means recurrent ruin of some among the borrowers
perpetually.

But competition is in the very nature of Society. The
moment a community begins to create wealth according
to the aptitudes of each producer and to exchange the
wealth so created, competition must necessarily appear.
There was plenty of competition in the centuries during
which Catholic principles were universally applied to
Society ; there was plenty of haggling and arrangement
of prices by buyer and seller in the medieval markets.
The very idea of “ a just price,” which was at the
foundation of all medieval social economics, involves the
idea of a price arrived at by some form of competitive
activity ; for if there were no competition no price could
be settled, or even arrived at.

It is with competition as it is with a thousand other
things : up to a certain point they are at once necessary
and beneficial; exaggerated beyond that point they
begin to be perilous ; still further exaggerated they
become poisonous and mortal.

Now competition begins to bear this vicious character
(destructive of Society through the destruction of the
small man) when it is uncorrected by the conception of
a Guild and by co-operative rules and supervision
watching for, and checking, economic action destructive
to the small owner.

So long as Status rules Society and Contract is only
in part admitted, Competition is thereby necessarily
checked. A man who was a member of a village com-
munity in Catholic times could get such and such a price
for his wheat by competition in the open market ;
a craftsman would get such and such a price for the
object he had made, and the more efficient craftsmen

152 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

would naturally get more than the les9 efficient. The
more industrious in domestic commerce (foreign com-
merce was largely free from supervision) would
accumulate wealth more rapidly than the less industrious.
But all through that world there vigorously existed
regulations jealously guarding the division of property
among many families and preventing the great man from
eating up the small.

The craftsman of the town Guild could not form a
monopoly ; he could not undertake more than a certain
amount of work to the detriment of his fellow craftsmen.
The same was true of the shopkeeper, whose activities
were regulated, or at least limited, by the Company or
Guild of which he formed a member. The number of
apprentices he might take was subject to licence ; and the
prices he might charge lay between certain known limits.
He might not forestall. He might not speculate. Still
less might he temporarily sell at a loss and so ruin a
competitor artificially.

The maleficent activity of excessive competition, of
Competition unchecked and uncontrolled, was prevented,
because it was regarded as a disease in Society (which
indeed it is) and treated as a disease mortal to human
dignity and freedom ; just as we regard grave excesses
in drink — though fermented liquor in moderation is
natural and does no harm. We have unfortunately in
the modern world only too much experience of what
unbridled competition will do ; there are few who have
not come across one or another of its evil effects. But
we shall judge them more clearly if we tabulate them here
in their order.

I say that the small man is dispossessed progressively ;
his economic freedom destroyed and “ eaten up ” by
the larger man, if Competition be unlimited. Now the
consideration of the following points will make this
evident. There are seven main ways in which
Unrestricted Competition destroys the small owner.

(i) The greater part of what are called “ overhead
charges,” the cost of management and the details of

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 153

furnishing and instrumentation and numerous other
details of commercial productive activity, is less, in
proportion to the concentration of capital. Ten small
shops cost more to run all put together than one large
shop ten times the size of each small unit. Moreover,
the management of a large unit being less human and
less domestic than that of a small unit, its discipline can
be more rigorously maintained and all manner of
economies effected by eliminating human feelings, which
would have to be taken into consideration by the owner
of a smaller unit. Great factories, great departments,
chain store organizations, everything of that kind, act
with the precision of a machine and with what may be
called (if we eliminate the human factor) the “ efficiency ”
of the machine. Therefore, in Competition, the large
unit can outdo the smaller unit and does in practice
destroy the smaller unit, as we see happening today
upon every side.

(2) The large unit, especially the individual controlling
large capital — the large manager or the large owner — is
in a better position for receiving information than his
smaller rival.

We had in England after the Great War an excellent
example of this. The great landowners being — or, at
any rate, their advisers being — of a class with special
powers for obtaining international knowledge, could
safely predict that the high agricultural prices, consequent
upon the dearth which necessarily followed the conflict,
would not last for long. Men’s powers of productivity
had been enhanced during the period of the War by the
stimulus which had been given to scientific discovery
and the creation of new machines, and there was bound
to come a glut of produce in agriculture as in everything
else.

But the small man had not the same opportunity for
judging the immediate future as the big man had.
When the landlords offered to sell the land to their
tenant farmers, the farmers eagerly bought because they
imagined that high prices of agricultural produce had

154 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION
come to stay. They had not the money indeed to buy
the farms for themselves, but they could and did borrow
the purchase price at usury from the banks. When the
fall in prices came, they could with difficulty keep up
their payments ; for the profits out of which payments
should have come had disappeared. The effect of the
whole transaction was that masses of English land had
been transferred from the old great landlords to the
banks, and that the men who actually tilled the soil and
had ventured their small capital in the development of
small farms, were left paying tribute to that money-
lending machine which modern banking has become.

This is only one instance ; many others will occur to
the reader within his own experience. Everywhere the
large man (though he often ruins himself by speculation)
is, other things being equal, in a better position to judge
the market than the small man ; and from this second
cause the larger unit, if Competition be unchecked, eats
up the lesser.

(3) The third avenue whereby this evil increases is
the superiority the large man has in the way of publicity.
It is notorious that money spent upon advertising in any
form, whether straightforwardly or by secret commissions
and bribery, is more effective, out of all proportion, as the
scale of payment increases. A hundred thousand pounds
a year spent in advertising some particular goods will
have far more than ten times the effect on sales than an
expenditure of ten thousand pounds. The expenditure
of a million pounds will have far more than ten times the
effect on sales than an expenditure of a hundred thousand
pounds. Through this command of publicity the large
man can, once more, outdistance and destroy the com-
petition of the small man. Further, as his scale increases
he can exercise greater pressure upon the organs of
publicity ; he is more necessary to the newspaper owners
than is his humbler rival, and attains thereby further
indirect publicity over and above the direct publicity of
the advertisement.

(4) The same is true of the power of secrecy pur-

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 155

chasable by large units of capital. They are far more
effective in this disreputable form of activity (and it is
as universal as it is disreputable) than are the lesser men.
An excellent example of this evil is to be seen in the patent
medicine trade. That trade is almost wholly charlatan.
A right to monopoly in some simple remedy is purchased
from the public authorities. The remedy is then sold
under a fancy name and a price put upon it producing
huge profits, all of which are dependent upon the duping
of the public. The whole thing would be blown sky-high
if the ingredients of the patent medicines and other con-
coctions were given in plain language and in full, and if
their wholesale price were also published.

The late Mr. Orage, one of the most active and
intelligent reformers of the last generation in England,
attempted this very necessary thing. He, in his little
intellectual review which was supported by so brilliant
a group of writers for so many years, published week after
week the ingredients of the English patent medicines and
the cost of those ingredients. Not a single one of the
main newspapers followed suit, or dared publish so much
as the fact that Orage was thus acting courageously in his
own limited sphere for the public good.

That is an example of comparatively simple and in-
nocuous secrecy. In the purchase of silence on much
more dangerous lines, large capital is of course supreme
and small capital would at once be prosecuted as a matter
of course. Large capital can bear the heavy legal costs
of appeal, whereas small capital will have exhausted its
resources long before the final court is reached. For
lawyers sell justice very dear.

(5) It is equally clear that large units of capital will
be tempted to accumulate by the hope of lesser incre-
ments than will small units of capital. To add another
ten thousand pounds to your original capital of ten
thousand pounds involves severe self-restraint and per-
petual foregoing of immediate pleasure or even necessity
for the sake of accumulation. But the business with a
million pounds capital will accumulate a further million

156 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

pounds at the same percentage of reward without an y
strain upon the men who control these large masses of
capital. There is no personal self-sacrifice involved ;
there is no abstention from any luxury. In other words,
the first steps in the accumulation of capital are in-
definitely harder than the next, and the last steps in the
accumulation of capital, the steps taken by the major
units, so far from being difficult, become, as it were,
automatic. After a certain stage of growth the difficulty
is not to increase the unit, but to prevent its swelling.

(6) As with the growth of capital, so with access
to credit. The smaller man approaching our modern
banking system, which controls all issue of credit and
therefore pretty well all our industrial and commercial
activities, is not what the controllers of that credit call
“ interesting.” He borrows with difficulty upon high
terms, and must pledge security out of all proportion to
that which his richer rival has to put down. The very
large units of production and exchange have access to
credit on a large scale, sometimes without any cover at all,
merely upon the prospect of their success, and always
upon terms far easier than are open to their smaller
rivals. It is perhaps on this line of easier credit that
large capital today does most harm to small capital, drives
it out and ruins it.

(7) But the worst, morally, and most destructive in
practice, of all the functions whereby large capital
destroys small ownership is the power and use of under-
selling. It is a grossly immoral act and one which in all
sane societies has been severely punished — but in the
competitive society of today it is taken for granted. The
small man cannot stand the loss to which the large man
challenges him during the struggle between them ; he is
ruined where his rival survives.

In general, under competition unchecked by co-
operative rules and the spirit of the guild or by usage
having the force of law and restraining the eating up of
the small man by the great, that murderous process takes
place inevitably, and, as it were, automatically. Thus the

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 157

man who was once a small owner and is now dispossessed,
becomes proletarian.

To give but one example out of fifty, where there were
many thousands of grocers with individual shops, men
economically free, dependent upon their own efforts and
servants to none, there are now as many thousands who
are mere managers for a great combine or trust, a
thing without personal conscience or responsibility, a
bitterly hard master and yet one upon whose control
the very lives of all these men who were once indepen-
dent now hang. I can remember the day when they
were economically free. I have lived into a day when
they are, to repeat the vigorous metaphor of the
Marxians, wage-slaves.

Coupled with Usury, Unrestricted Competition des-
troys the small man for the profit of the great and in so
doing produces that mass of economically unfree citizens
whose very political freedom comes in question because
it has no foundation in any economic freedom, that is, any
useful proportion of property to support it. Political
freedom without economic freedom is almost worthless,
and it is because the modem proletariat has the one kind
of freedom without the other that its rebellion is now
threatening the very structure of the modern world.

Machinery and Rapid Communications

While the growth of banking and international com-
merce riveted the capitalist system more securely upon
Society, another process was developing, which came
in to add to the effect of the international mercantile spirit
and the international financial organization. This was
the growth of machinery and of rapid intercommunica-
tion.

W*e must define our terms :

“ Machinery ” has always been used in the sense of
secondary mechanical appliances. When first a man took
a piece of timber and used it as a lever to prize up a

158 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

stone, he was indeed using a mechanical appliance — that
is, some instrument other than that of his own limbs — but
he was using it directly. When, sooner or later, he
began to use a second lever in order to increase the power
of the first, he had initiated machinery — that is, a use of
secondary appliances removed one degree further from
the primitive use of the human limb, to do his work.
When man used any kind of natural fan, such as a palm
leaf, to make a local draught that should blow the chaff
away from the wheat, his work was only one step re-
moved from the still simpler method of blowing into it
with his mouth. But when he attached a number of
vanes to a wheel, and thus produced a permanent wind
for the winnowing of the wheat, without the direct inter-
vention of his hand, through an intermediate instrument,
he was using a machine.

Now the original machines that man thus devised for
himself were not of their nature expensive. They might
become expensive through the scale upon which they
were made, but they were not expensive in principle.
Even so complicated a piece of machinery as a windmill
was something that a man could set up in simple form for
a few hundred pounds. It was when men began to devise
machines on quite another scale that the machine came
in to support and extend Capitalism among mankind :
when the ordinary small owner, or even somewhat larger
owner, could not hope to purchase the machine himself
out of his private means.

The mam cause of this revolution, the appearance of
large-scale machinery, was the perfection and bringing
into use of the steam engine, though before this there
had already been harnessed on a fairly large scale the
power of falling water. It is from this last that we get
the term “ mill ” applied to a factory. In Lancashire, in
England today, we talk of cotton mills — a term dating
from the time when the machinery of the mills was
driven by water. This also explains the geographical
situation of the early English machine “ concentrations,”
(ironically called today “ manufactories,” as though men

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 159

were still making things in them by hand ! ) in the valleys
of rapid streams.

Let us here point out in passing a matter to which we
shall return more than once and which has already been
touched upon when we were considering the organization
of industry in Catholic times. Had there been any
existent vital and energetic institution left in Society after
the Reformation for the use of small property in co-
ordinated form — that is, in combination, so that the
average man’s holding could be put to useful purpose in
company with the holdings of a great number of other
men of his own sort — the new evils would not have arisen.

There were expensive instruments used in the old days,
for instance, in building a harbour. The big instruments
for driving piles in the setting up of cities (such as
Venice) upon swampy land, were quite beyond the means
of the master-mason or master-carpenter of the day.
But the Guild could and did undertake the common
work and share out the benefits of the wealth it produced.
The Guild watched jealously against the encroachments
of the contractor ; indeed, it usually eliminated the
necessity of that intermediary altogether, and it watched
still more jealously over the continued possession by the
small man of his grip upon the means of production.

But the Guild and all the spirit of the Guild had been
destroyed in the great religious catastrophe of the XVIth
century, that destruction having been completed in
the XVIIth and early XVIIIth. When large concentrated
machinery came in the middle and later XVIIIth century
and was- combined with the use of large-scale credit
from the new banking system, small men were quite
out of touch with the innovation. They could not,
save in combination, purchase the new instrument or
make the buildings for accommodating them. But their
power of combination had been destroyed together with
the force of a social religion in which the power of
combination had been rooted.

This does not mean that individual small men could
not become big capitalists under the new system. They

i6o CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

certainly could do so by a mixture of talent, foresight,
secrecy, industry, and, above all, greed. All of which
characters you find combined, for instance, in such a man
as Arkwright, who made his huge fortune out of a new
spinning machine. But the fact that the individual could
take advantage of the new conditions to outstrip indi-
viduals of his own type and become their economic
master, while they drifted into wage-slavery under him,
makes no exception to the rule that big machinery
reinforced Capitalism. On the contrary, it proves the
case against big machinery as nothing else could prove it.
When it is objected that under the new system the small
man could rise, and that, therefore, no social injustice was
done, an elementary truth is obscured or implicitly
denied — to wit, the elementary truth that the well-being
of one man, risen over, and so destroying a multitude of
his fellows by competition, is the exact opposite of the
well-being of all men.

Anyhow, it is manifest that the discovery and use of
these new great instruments strengthened, and made
permanent and (unless the philosophy of Society were
changed) inevitable, the Capitalist development.

This development had for its original home and
breeding-ground industrial Protestant England and the
industrial Protestant lowlands of Scotland. From these
the influence spread, and these districts gave their tone
to all that was later to be called Modem Capitalism.

That system produced goods on a new and vaster
scale, which made it possible for a much larger population
to live. It concentrated the process of production, and
therefore the unfortunate human agents now tied to the
machine, within large towns which kept on growing and
growing out of measure. It raised these vast accumula-
tions of bricb and mortar, squalid architecture, drab
streets and slums which set their mark upon all industrial
society. Before the process was mature, industrial
Capitalism, grown to such a new stature, had come to be
identified in all men’s minds with the group of social evils
which are now bringing it to ruin. For this new machine

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 161

age, spiritually mismanaged by Usury and Competition,
subjected to no principles but greed, whether mercantile
or banking, put mankind to a strain that was bound to
become intolerable and to threaten all Society with
catastrophe.

So far, so bad : but there was to come in, side by side
with use of the new machinery, and indeed forming a
special department of it, another factor which powerfully
reinforced this main factor of mechanical products. This
other factor was rapidity of communication both in goods
and ideas.

The power of steam and the mechanical engines con-
nected with it first made more secure, and on the average
much more rapid, transport of goods and men by water.
Such transport was no longer dependent upon the
caprice of calm or adverse winds. It was subject, of
course, to the caprice of exceptionally stormy weather,
but the average increase in rapidity and sureness through
the use of steam made a new thing of water transport
from the early years of the XIXth century.

To this was soon added rapid transport by land also,
born of the use of steam combined with the principle of
the railway : a principle already used in the past to aid
the running of trucks, before steam traction appeared.
With the rapid transport of the steamship and the rail-
road Capitalism received another heavy and vastly
increasing reinforcement. In an industrialized modern
country, from a tenth to somewhat more of the popula-
tion was soon directly bound to the wage system of the
great transport units. Further, the power of rapid
transport in goods and in men made, obviously, for a
concentration in control. One man and his subordinates
will look after the business covering such and such an
area, through its various branches. They are able to
manage the business successfully, though with difficulty,
even if that area be of such and such a size, and even if
their travel over it has to be conducted through horse
vehicles and by riding, and through the sailing ship. But
with the coming of steam transport, the area over which

162 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

one concentrated business could extend was indefinitely
increased. An agent despatched from London to Man-
chester in the morning could act personally in Lancashire
the same day and return to report in London that same
night : before steam this double journey took from four
days to a week.

As though this were not enough, there came in a new
factor of rapidity in communication : electric communica-
tion, first m the shape of the electric telegraph* then,
within living memory, in the shape of the telephone.
These applications of science to commerce and industry
yet further increased the hold of concentrated capital and
of its central organ, finance, upon mankind. One
speculative order which, in the old days, would have
taken, say a week to transmit and another week before
the result could be received and acted upon, could pass
after the introduction of the telegraph, over a whole
continent. A man can attempt to make a comer in
this or that commodity in all the markets of the world,
though he remain sitting in one office in London or
Chicago during the few critical hours of his success or
failure.

Over these last new instruments the small owner was
quite powerless. He did not even compete with the large
owner until he had, by luck or worse, made his own
accumulation and forced his way competitively into a
position where he could command the ear of those who
distributed large credit. With the appearance of virtually
instantaneous transport of ideas, of orders and of in-
formation through no matter what distance, the last
stone had been added to the edifice of Industrial Capi-
talism and its superstructure of international finance and
international exchange of goods.

The small owner appeared to be sunk for ever. He
remained precariously hanging on to the structure of

* It wai to called for yean to dittinguith it from iti predecettor, the temaphore
telegraph, which conveyed mettaget from one prominent height to another by
aignala. It waa thui that the newt of important naval action and orden were
trantmitted from the mam Englith porti to the Admiralty in London during
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wart.

. CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 163

modern Capitalism as a parasite, and an anachronism
at that. He struggled hard to maintain his human
dignity and personal and family independence. He tried
to do it in the family shop or the dying family craft ;
but he was hard put to it and disappeared in greater and
greater numbers year by year. The end of the process
was clear to all independent observers soon enough, and
became at last obvious even to the mass of the oppressed
themselves. That end could only be, apparently, the
holding of all industrialized and urban mankind, such
of it as was attached to our civilization, in the grasp of
a few pre-eminent controllers of the means of production,
distribution and exchange.

But even as this fatal turn to the long and degrading
evil appeared thus before men as an unescapable doom,
there was appearing, as there always does, the reaction
which proposed to undo all that had been done.

Industrial Capitalism itself, its system of morals, its
negative greed, its whole being, had bred a child,
fashioned in its own image, which child bid fair to
murder his father. That child was the social philosophy
first confusedly known as Socialism, later more completely
and logically as Communism. To this vital issue of the
whole affair we must next turn.

COMMUNISM

The evils of the state of Society into which we have now
fallen have been stated and examined. We have also
stated and examined the process whereby those evils
came upon us. They are the ultimate and mature fruits
of that disruption of Christendom, three to four hundred
years ago, through which our civilization progressively
lost its religion and which is generally known as the
Reformation.

Those evils are generally labelled under the title
“ Capitalism ” ; but before studying the proposed
remedy for them we must make sure of our terms.

We mean by Capitalism a condition of Society under
which the mass of free citizens, or at any rate a deter-
mining number of them, are not possessed of the means
of production in any useful amount and therefore live
upon wages doled out to them by the possessors of land
and capital, men who thus exploit at a profit the dis-
possessed, which “ dispossessed ” are blown as the
“ Proletariat.”

It is all-important to note that the word “ Capitalism ”
thus used as the name for the great evil which, in its
maturity, threatens the very existence of our society, does
not signify the rights of property. It signifies rather an
abuse of property : property developed into an unnatural
top-heavy form, under which it cannot normally function,
and only threatens disaster.

Capitalism no more means the affirmation of an
individual, or a family’s, right to possess land, machinery,
164

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 165

housing, clothing, reserves of food and the rest, than
fatty degeneration of the heart means the normal function
of the heart as the circulator of the blood in a healthy-
human body. Capitalism is an evil not because it defends
the legal right to property, but because it is of its nature
the use of that legal right for the defence of a privileged
few against a much greater number who though free
and equal citizens are without economic basis of their
own. Therefore the root evil which we roughly term
“ Capitalism ” should more accurately be termed
“ Proletarianism ” ; for the characteristic of the bad
state of Society which we call today “ Capitalist,” is
not the fact that the few own, but the fact that the
many, though politically equal to their masters and free
to exercise all the functions of a citizen, cannot enjoy
full economic freedom.

It is the existence of a Proletariat so large as to give
its tone to the whole of a Society which makes that
Society capitalist. It is not the natural and half-
inevitable tendency of the Capitalist to exploit the
situation which is the root of the evil ; the root of the
evil is the presence of vast numbers who are defenceless
against exploitation.

Capitalism works for profit, and men have called this
in their haste and confusion the main evil of the capitalist
system. It is not so. There is nothing immoral or
exasperating to human feeling in profit as a motive for
production, distribution or exchange. The well-to-do
shopkeeper travels by railway, the railway under the
capitalist system makes a profit out of his journey — or
ought to do so if it be properly conducted. The share-
holder in a railway buys goods in the shopkeeper’s shop ;
the shopkeeper makes a profit out of him. Both trans-
actions are perfectly normal to human nature and the
human conscience. The profit in the case of the railway
is the legitimate reward attached to the saving of capital
and the intelligent use of the same for human needs.
The profit of the shopkeeper is the legitimate reward of
similar activities in his line of business.

1 66 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Or again, consider a situation which you may see in
actual practice throughout many agricultural districts in
the world : men using their own land, living in their
own homes and producing some seasonal form of
wealth, say livestock, and living as neighbours with
other men of the same countryside who produce
some other seasonal product, say wheat. There will
for each of these independent owners, each of these
economically free families, be a slack time in the
year and a time of exceptional need for labour ; a
“ peak ” in the demand for labour, as it is called.
The livestock man, if he be a breeder of sheep, for
instance, will need reinforcement of labour during
lambing and shearing. If he be a breeder of cattle
stalled in winter, he will need exceptional labour at
haymaking time. The wheat-grower will need extra
labour for garnering of the grain. The man occupied
in cereal farming will hire himself out at a wage to
help the others during the haymaking season ; similarly
the man occupied in livestock breeding will hire himself
out during his slack seasons, when the beasts are all at

Ere and the cereal harvest is being cut and garnered.

party receives wages ; out of each the wage-payer
makes a profit ; but there is no strain for there is mutual
advantage.

Let us then repeat and firmly fix this main point : the
evil, the root evil, of that to which the term Capitalism
has come to be applied, is neither its functioning for profit
nor its independence upon legally protected private
property ; but the presence of a Proletariat, that is, of
men possessing political freedom, but dispossessed of
economic freedom, and existing in such large numbers
in any community as to determine the tone of all that
community.

When the mass of men and families in a society think
of themselves as wage-earners and are so regarded by the
few who pay them their wages and make a profit out of
them, that society is capitalist. It is capitalist not because
a certain proportion possesses capital and uses it, but

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 167

because the determining number* of the whole society
is proletarian.

Now let us consider the evils afflicting such a society
and appreciate them in their due proportion.

Here as in everything human the spiritual outweighs
the material. It is the spiritual evils attaching to
proletarianism which are the chief cause of its increasing
instability, and of these spiritual evils two are particularly
prominent :

(1) The sense of injustice aroused in men politically
free, but deprived of economic freedom.

(2) The indignant protest of the man who knows
himself to be a full citizen and is yet exploited by another
more fortunate than himself, who has no claim save his
superior wealth to exercise such power.

There is a lack of moral sanction which renders the
situation intolerable. When Status is generally recog-
nized, a moral sanction for the relations between superior
and inferior, even if there be economic evils, can be
discovered ; the duty of the feudal superior, the loyalty
of the feudal inferior, are moral realities, familiar to
both parties and believed by both parties to be the
guarantees of their civilized life. There is no such bond
when Contract has taken the place of Status, and when

* The reader will recall my former uie of this phrase, “ determining number,”
but I will repeat it here at it it essential to the comprehension of the argument.
A determining number in any matter, economic, social, religious or what not,
it a number tuch that it gives its tone to Society in general. It does not mean
a majority ; it doet not mean any fixed proportion , it it discoverable only by
experience, inspection and familiarity with the activity in question. For
instance, the number of married adults in a society may not come to half the
total of that society, m which children, bachelors, spinsters, widows, widowers,
etc., may make up a majority — but the institution of marriage none the lets
gives its tone to that society.

The proportion of lawless men, outrage, etc , in a particular district may
apply only to a minority and even to a comparatively small minority ; and
yet that proportion may be to considerable as to create a " determining number,"
to that the society is properly called “ a lawless one.” A good example of this
it the banditry which was with tuch difficulty extirpated m Cornea, The
number of bandits were never more than a few score at the most, in a population
of many thousands, yet they were sufficient to make everyone talk (and rightly
talk) of that country at “ infested with bandits.”

1 68 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

one man works for the profit of another merely because
he has had no choice but to contract so to do.

Another main spiritual evil attaching to a proletarian
state, that is, to “ Capitalism,” is the increasing contrast
between luxury and superfluity on the part of those in
economic power, and the indigence or mere subsistence
of those economically dependent upon them. Here
again, were it not for civic equality between the two

Parties, the contrast would not involve so great a strain.

!ut if civic equality be proclaimed and accepted by both
parties, especially by the less fortunate of the two, then
a very strong sense of injustice is aroused. The man
who works in all weathers at a wage, transporting his
wealthy fellow-citizens to their places of amusement or
worse, has this contrast actively before his eyes con-
tinually, and the mass of a proletarian population in any
great urban industrial centre is conscious of the contrast
in varying degrees.

Moreover (as I have said) this contrast is increasing,
and the lack of moral sanction to it is all the more glaring
because there is less and less correspondence between the
enjoyment of superfluity and the talent or industry which
might be put forward as an excuse for the advantages
enjoyed.

A lucky speculation brought off without a stroke of
genuine work and having no productive value to mankind
will create a millionaire. The chance of locality in a
rapidly developing country will do the same thing. What
is worse, the reprehensible activities which permit vast
and rapid accumulations are in great and increasing
proportion, for they include not only the speculative
element (not in itself immoral), but the exercise of
cunning and a large measure of fraud : what is called
“ keeping on the right side of the law ” — and not
always that.

To these main spiritual evils attaching to the system
as we see it before us today in its maturity, may be
added yet another spiritual evil, somewhat less, but
weighty all the same. It is the instability of the affair.

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 169

Great economic power over other men appears
suddenly in such ana such hands — to disappear almost
as suddenly.

Another spiritual evil not to be neglected is the im-
personal character running through the whole : the
divorce of human personality from production, the lack
of a human bond between those who labour and those
who profit by their labour ; the anonymity of the great
corporations under which the wage-earner worb, or the
remoteness of the individual (when it is an individual)
who commands, from those who are commanded.

On another and lower plane, but essential to an under-
standing of the situation, are the material evils of the
system. It involves inevitable recurring destitution for
many and the permanent peril of destitution even for
those who are not for the moment suffering it. Such
destitution may be met by relief, but it is in the nature
of the situation that the relief must be insufficient for
decent living, i.e., for the standard properly attached to
civic life in a community of free men. Since it is to
the advantage of the wage-payer to pay as little as
possible, even well-paid labour will have no more than
what is regarded in a particular society as the reasonable
level of subsistence. The lower ranks of labour will
commonly have less, and if public relief were afforded
even up to the wage-level of the lowest ranks of labour,
that relief would compete in the labour market j it
would check or dry up the supply of wage-labour. It
would tend to render the performance of work by the
wage-earner redundant ; for if relief were on a scale
approaching regular wages the average man would not
work for a sum which he could obtain without working.

Such are the main evils attaching to an economic
mtem based upon proletarian labour. There is a whole
department of other evils on which we have no space
here to digress, though they are socially of high im-
portance ; there is the standardisation of life, the
increasing lack of choice and diversity in articles produced,
the mechanical spirit unnaturally imposed upon the

170 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

non-mechanical, organic nature of man, and so on.
But we will confine ourselves to the main evils here
noted because they most clearly explain the strain which
has been set up and which cannot be resolved in one
way or another. For every strain is necessarily and
inevitably resolved either at the expense of good re-
adjustment or bad readjustment — which last we call
catastrophe.

Now the resolving of the strains set up by Capitalism
may be effected in one of three ways. The strains are
due to the juxtaposition of two incompatible elements,
political freedom and economic lack of freedom : the
political freedom of the proletarian, which enables him
to contract and binds him to the contract he makes,
coupled with the fact that the proletarian is deprived
of the means of livelihood and must live at the will of
another. The strain can only be resolved by the elimina-
tion of one of these two incompatible factors ; either
we must restore property to the bulk of the families in
the state which are now proletarian, or we must suppress
freedom.

If we are to suppress freedom, there are two wap in
which we may do it ; we may either suppress political
freedom (that is the right to contract and the obligation
to fulfil contracted engagements) by depriving the
proletariat of this right and leaving only the Capitalist a
fully free citizen ; or we may hand over the means of
production, distribution and exchange to the community
— that is, hand them over to public officers and suppress
freedom in all, Capitalist and proletarian alike, thus
reducing everyone to a common proletarian condition,
dependent no longer upon many capitalist controllers,
but only upon one omnipotent single capitalist master —
the State.

But if we are to retain freedom, then we can only do
so by keeping the determining mass of the citizens as
possessors of property with personal control over it.
For property is the necessary condition of economic
freedom in the full sense of that term. He that has

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 171

not property is under economic servitude to him who has
property, whether the possessor of it be another individual
or the State.

There are thus, as I have said, three methods by which
the strain may be relieved ; one which consists in the
reintroduction of private property on a large scale where
it has been lost, and the ending of the proletariat by thus
turning its members into owners ; and two others, the
suppression of freedom in the masses for the benefit of
the few, or the suppression of freedom in all under the
domination of one common master : the State.

The latter proposition is known today as “ Com-
munism.” And let it not be objected that this solution,
Communism, is no necessary third issue because property
might be held collectively in smaE amounts, or at any
rate in units less than that of universal social control.

It cannot be so ; for either the spirit at work is a
spirit of economic unification throughout the State,
whereby the private choice and activity of the family is
eliminated, or the spirit at work is one protecting and
encouraging the independence of the family. If the
second spirit be at work, some measure of inequality
cannot but arise : a multiple diversity, in the case of a
large state an indefinitely large diversity, of private
interests and methods.

You may incorporate the craftsmen of one activity,
say buEders, in one guEd, or in a coUection of smaUer
guEds. You may charter the guEds in a Communist
State so that each be caHed self-governing. But even
so, either their moral life would repose upon the con-
ception of economic independence in their units, or on
the control of those units by the guEd. And if the
second solution be adopted it is inevitable that the
regulation of the various activities of the various crafts
and occupations shaH faE under the general control of
the society as a whole. For either the balance must be
preserved by the perpetual interplay of very numerous
diverse particular forces, or it must be imposed by the
sovereignty of one.

172 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

The two ideas are not supplementary, they are hostile.
The one, Communism, is the ideal of a disciplined body
such as is an army ; but an army not as actual armies
are (separate from general Society and exceptional in
structure to the world around them), rather of an army the
private soldiers and officers of which cover the whole
area of Society. The other ideal, well-distributed
property, presupposes a perpetual flux and interplay
between the various units, which units are the families
composing the State.

Rules may indeed be made to safeguard a system of
widespread Property, so that as large a number as possible
of those units remain proprietors. Competition may be
restrained in the degree necessary to prevent the eating
up of the small man by the great. But on one of two
opposed, contradictory, and mutually destructive moral
attitudes must Society repose : either the attitude which
regards the citizen as having for the end of his being the
good of the State, and the State as master of the citizen ;
or the other opposite ideal of the State composed of free
citizens ; either the State admitting exceptions to its
complete economic domination, or free owners reluctantly
admitting necessary exceptions to their freedom and
permitting some measure of control by the State.

It is a fundamental error in the appreciation of mankind
to conceive of any political doctrine and the denial of it
as reconcilable. There are two spirits facing each other ;
those two spirits are contradictory, and one or the other
will triumph. Both cannot, nor can they mix.

Of the two solutions, which must be obvious to every
observer of the modem industrial quarrel, that of
Communism follows the line of least resistance.

The restoration of property would be a complicated,
arduous and presumably a lengthy business ; the trans-
formation of a Capitalist Society into a Communist one
needs nothing but the extension of existing conditions.

Here you already have a proletariat, used to organiza-
tion under the discipline of those who control the means

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 173

of production. You have but to substitute for the various
titles to possession held by those who now control,
one title of possession vested in the State and your end
is accomplished.

Life under Communism goes on for the mass of men
exactly as it went on before under Capitalism, because
the mass of men in an industrialized Capitalist Society
already live in a dependence and semi-servitude hardly
distinguishable from the full servitude which Communism
would involve. The Communist State would have no
motive to reduce further the leisure or the amenities
of life, such as they are, of the existing proletariat. On
the contrary, save out of malice or hostility to individuals
who disapproved of it, Communism would presumably
in general ameliorate the lot of the wage-earner and
would (as its predicators take for granted) maintain the
full activity of the system under collective ownership,
which we now discover under divided and private
ownership by the few. A group of great capitalist
railway companies can become a State group of railways
by a stroke of the pen ; the thing is done in a moment,
whether by immediate confiscation or by gradual buying
out of the existing shareholders. The thing has recently
been done before our eyes in Belgium, for example,
where the railways passed easily by a piece of book-keeping
from private shareholders to the State. One has but to
extend the transfers until they shall cover the whole of
Society. The more perfected the capitalist system
becomes, the wider its area of activity, the less does the
old argument in favour of private enterprise apply ; the
more exactly similar does the new Communist State
appear to the Capitalist State of which it seems to be the
natural descendant, and of which it takes over all
morals except the relics of private property.

As to the consolidation of so simple a change, from
Capitalism to Communism, that is effected by a funda-
mental law, brief and easy of comprehension by all.
Abolish the right of inheritance, and Communism will
have come to stay.

174 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Such is the abstract or arithmetical position, the mere
pattern, on which the Communist idea of a new state
reposes.

Those who accept it as an ideal might, it would seem,
propose nothing but good ; they eliminate at a stroke
the injustices, the embitterments, the indignations
attaching to Capitalism ; they relieve the human
conscience of those evils ; they restore peace.

It has recently been said by a prominent protagonist
of Communism in Western Europe : “ Today, with us,
every shopkeeper is the enemy of every other shopkeeper ;
every employed man the enemy of every employer ; under
Communism no man is the enemy of another.”

Put thus, the case for Communism appears over-
whelmingly strong; yet we know, as a mere historical
fact, that the advance of the Communist idea has been
very slow and has met with the toughest resistance from
the conscience of what was once Christendom ; we know
that it is rejected with the highest determination, we
know that it cannot be imposed without violence pushed
to extreme limits ; we know by experience that the way
to it lies through wholesale massacre.

Why is Communism, apparently a full solution of our
problems, detested by the average man ? Why can it
only be imposed by murder and terror ?

How are we to reconcile the contradiction ?

By understanding that when we say the word “ Com-
munism ” we of necessity mean much more than —
indefinitely more than — a mere pattern, a mere abstract
arrangement. We connote something which has been in
the eyes of humanity, which necessarily is to the Christian
tradition, to the normal man hearing of it today, inhuman.
In point of fact Communism in this concrete sense cannot
be established, nor ever has been, save by murderous
violence applied under pure despotism. The effort to
establish it will, among men still possessing the traditions
of our culture, that is, the inheritance of Christendom,
be resisted to the death ; and to understand why that
should be so, let us consider not the mere word

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 175

Communism, the mere conception of common ownership
(which is as old as the world and has as little content as
a vacuum) but the actual thing, the innumerable
connotations in living reality, which the practice of
Communism involves.

To make this appreciation we must begin by recapitu-
lating the historical development of the whole business,
that is the establishment of Capitalism and the corres-
ponding growth of Communism as a remedy for the evils
of Capitalism.

The reader is acquainted with the first of these
processes ; it is indeed the matter of all the last few
sections of this book. The unity of Western Christendom
was wrecked by the explosion which we call the
Reformation. Slowly, as the dust subsided and we were
able to survey the ruins, we could perceive certain
consequences emerging. There being no longer any
common moral authority nor a common moral tradition
sufficiently vigorous to restrain the coming evils, they
grew apace and the first of them was the creation of a
Proletariat ; not (as we were at pains to point out) that
there was no Proletariat in the older and better state of
affairs ; for such a class, men of the same political standing
as their fellows, but, unlike their fellows, deprived of
property and therefore of security in livelihood, had
come into existence before the end of the Middle Ages
in a few commercial centres.

But before the Reformation, the Proletariat was highly
restricted in numbers and confined to few places. Had
it expanded under the old conditions it would have been
taken in hand and securely established within the general
rules of Christian society by new Guilds. When that
society, however, broke up, there was nothing left to
restrain the growth of the Proletariat wherever favourable
conditions could be found for that growth. There were
indeed many districts, mainly agricultural in character,
where the loss of the old morals with their social safe-
guards, the Guild and the rest of it, did not produce a

1 76 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

with most of the population of Scandinavia and many
other areas. But wherever life was complicated and
economic forces active, a Proletariat took root and
expanded under Protestantism until it became the
dominant feature in the social landscape. This was
particularly the case with England, which, as it was the
only Roman (and therefore anciently civilized) province
to abandon the common unity of Western Christendom,
could bring to the new non-Catholic developments an
energy far superior to that of the outer, non-Roman,
more barbaric lands.

In England therefore, based on the vast economic
Revolution of the XVIth century, the sudden enrichment
of a new class which battened on the spoil of all collegiate
property — hospitals, and schools as well as mnoastic
establishments and religious endowment of all kinds — a
Proletariat was formed even upon the land.

Never let it be forgotten that this agricultural pro-
letariat was the source, model and breeding ground of
the urban proletariat that was to follow. The thing
happened in the XVIIth century ; it was a product of
the second and third generation after the loss of their
ancestral faith by the English. England was funda-
mentally Catholic in ethic during the first years of
Elizabeth : 1560 to 1585. During the next lifetime,
say, 1585 to 1625, a considerable and enthusiastic minority
of anti-Catholics had arisen, and, what was more impor-
tant than its numbers, that minority held all the reins of
social life, from the central government down to the
smallest village school. The mass of people were more
or less indifferent. There remained on the other wing
a very large minority who would have been pleased with
the return of the old religion but who were no longer
particularly conscious of the principle of European
unitv. They were indeed so strongly filled with the
local patriotism of the day that they suffered from a
spiritual struggle between their English patriotism and
their international religious leanings. This was the
England in which the Civil Wars were fought ; some few

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 177

of the sympathizers with the old religion were killed
off, and vastly more were ruined. Any man of substance
who had defended the King and the traditions of
England was held for ransom in every class. So it
was with the great Stanleys, so it was with the middle
class Catholic brother of the poet Milton. With the
latter part of the XVIIth century England as a nation
had lost her old economic and ethical philosophy and
was about to produce the modern industrial world.

Under the effect of that new philosophy the remaining
large mass of economically free peasants disappeared.
By the year 1700 perhaps not a quarter of the agricultural
population had title in the land they tilled, and the
proportion was rapidly diminishing, more and more
were growing dependent on a wage.

Then came the full growth of the new forces which
were to support social change, and at the same time to
extend the numbers of the proletariat and establish still
further their dependence upon a small class of owners.
Overseas commerce and banking we saw to be the chief
of these new adjuncts to the new system. The fortunes
built up by the one and the financial control of the other
made the coexistence of a very large proletarian body
and their capitalist masters certain and secure. On top
of this came the new use of machinery, then rapidity
of communications.

So much for the material development, which had all
proceeded in direct line from the spiritual change of
preceding generations. But there went on at the same
time another development following also in direct line
from that spiritual change ; this other development it
was which gave its moral atmosphere to the new system,
not only in England, but in all Western Europe : it was
loss of vision.

The break-up of unity had rendered men bewildered,
confused and therefore at least doubtful, if not in the
matter of doctrine at any rate on the principle of certitude
therein. The quality of Faith was lost, or rather faded,
and with the loss of Faith the instinct of social

178 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

self -preservation weakened. Popular Faith grew less and
less operative as time went on, even in those parts of
European society which kept to the traditional practice
of religion. With that loss went the loss of the social
guarantees which the old religion had bred. Usury and
excessive universal competition, for instance, came to
be taken for granted throughout our society. Under
those conditions it was presumable that small property
would decay and wage-slavery take its place whenever
the conditions were favourable.

The breakdown of religion having created a Proletariat
on the one side, permitted on the other side a social
arrangement whereby those who possessed capital in
sufficient amounts and who controlled the reserves of
livelihood would as a matter of course exploit those who
did not. Status having been dissolved and replaced by
Contract, the old human bonds having been replaced by
mechanical arrangements, what we call Capitalism
followed as a matter of course, built up by the proletarian
conditions which had come first and which, with
Capitalism, were an ultimate product of the weakening
or disappearance of that religion which had been the
foundation, the bond and creator of our ancient culture.

“ All Wars,” it was said to me in boyhood by a great
man, old and very wise (Cardinal Manning), “ are
ultimately religious.” So it certainly was in this case.
The enormous evils of a rising Capitalism proceeded
from the disruption followed by the loss of religion, and
war threatens from that same cause today.

It was in the same atmosphere that there rose the
proposed remedy, even worse than the disease.
Capitalism had arisen through the misuse and exag-
geration of certain rights, notably the right of property —
the basis of economic freedom — and the right of contract
which is one of the main functions of economic freedom.
Therefore, even under Capitalism so long as the old
doctrines were in part remembered it was possible to
recall the principles whereby Society had once been sane
and well ordered. But as a Godless greed pursued its

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 179

career from excess to excess, it provoked a sort of twin
hostile brother, equally Godless, born in the same
atmosphere of utter disregard for the foundational
virtues of humility and charity. This hostile younger
brother of Capitalism was destined to be called
Communism, and is today setting out to murder its elder.

I have said that Communism, the thing, the concrete
institution (for it is no less) which has arisen among us
today, is of necessity vastly more than a mere abstract
proposition of mere community in the means of pro-
duction ; it is an intense, creative, applicable creed with
a defined and vivid philosophy, such that those who
adopt it are necessarily the enemies of the Christian
religion and particularly of that which is the source and
principle of being within the Christian tradition — the
Catholic Church.

What today we call Communism does not only deny
the liberties of man, it denies the dignity of man. Its
whole career, not from its inception, but from the
moment when its full nature became manifest, stands
witness to this truth ; Communist society on the model
of those already in existence (as in Russia) and those
struggling to come into existence (as in Spain at the
moment) is primarily, before it is anything else, the
enemy of God and His Christ.

In all this there is no ambiguity left any longer ; there
is no doubt. The forces are set out in line of battle ;
the preliminary dispersed skirmishes are over ; the line
dividing our ancient culture from its deadly foe is clean
drawn.

Communism is proposed as the universal, obvious and
final remedy for the mortal evils of Capitalism ; but that
remedy is wholly destructive because in the very heart
of things it opposes the Creator of things, and in proposing
an immediate good, sets out to kill the fundamental
source of happiness in mankind. Heretical dispute and
distortion of certain Catholic Doctrines produced
Capitalism and a consequent indifference to those
Doctrines confirmed it ; but a complete denial of all

180 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Catholic Doctrine and an intense Atheism produced
Materialist Communism, now proposed as a remedy.

The war upon which we are already engaged and which
will soon absorb the attentions of us all is a religious war.
Of this indeed most of the potential combatants are not
yet aware, but it is only a matter of time for all to be
aware of it and openly proclaim their adhesion to the
one side or the other : nay, enrol themselves upon one
side or the other. We perceive this inner central
character running through Communism during the whole
of its rapid progress.

At the beginning came partial and sporadic protest
against the evils which Industrial Capitalism has launched.
Those protests have no cohesion, they crop up in the
shape of various theories from writers who are not
themselves engaged in industrial processes, writers who
are neither capitalists nor wage-earners, sometimes middle
class politicians vaguely groping for impossible remedies
or spinning phrases too vague to have any true application.
You have the French extravagants with their petty
followings ; you have the experiments (and failures) of
the English, such as the movement of Robert Owen ;
you have in the much larger merely political movements,
such as the Chartist movement, a certain distant
admixture of economic revolt. But the thing does not
take on shape and body until the mid-XIXth century ;
and when it does so, it still calls itself by an ambiguous
name ; the term “ Socialism ” becomes a common label
for the various theories of attack upon the principle of
property, the various policies of communal control at
the expense of the family and of individual freedom.

The general air of the time over the whole of Society,
far beyond the field of mere economic effort, favoured
such an advance against human dignity and sane social
life, notably against the family. The permanence of
marriage was questioned, the education of children was
taken out of the hands of their parents who were put back
to a lower and lower position in the moulding of the lives
of the young. In the particular economic field the rights

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 181

of property were no longer founded upon the nature
and dignity of man, the safeguarding of his freedom of
will, his personality, but upon arguments concerning the
community alone. That is a false basis, and it has bred
the evil fruit which all false philosophy breeds. That
philosophy even appeared in the monstrous form of
asserting that the indefinite extension of private greed
would wort out to the advantage of all. Such was the
very central principle of what was known in England as
“ The Manchester School.” It wrought havoc not only
in the social relations of men, but even in his excemal
surroundings ; the repulsive industrial towns of the
North of England are a monument to the ill that can be
done by false doctrine.

Against the increasing and soon to be intolerable evils
of Capitalism, the nebulous congeries of Reforms to
which was given the common name of “ Socialist,” were
manifestly insufficient. But men hesitated to push the
proposed change to its full conclusion. The reformers of
the XIXth century used vaguely such formulae as “ from
each according to his capacities ; to each according to his
needs.” They promised a society in which there should
still be as much private ownership as would satisfy the
equally vague instincts of their hearers, and attempted in
some way to combine the principle of property with the
implications of its opposite. They preached antagonism
without conflict and wandered at large amid a host of
similar self-contradictions.

This vague Socialism could not last. That which was
to thrust it disdainfully aside was already born and
growing rapidly to maturity. That which was to destroy
Socialism was the specifically announced assumption — let
us call it the Dogma — which comes forward in double
shape just after the middle of the century; the full
doctrine of Materialism.

It commonly takes a lifetime for some innovation among
men to grow to full stature. The older spirits trained in
other thoughts must die out and a new generation not only
grow up, but become mature and have time to find itself

1 82 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

and even to become at last the revered seniors who are
listened to with authority, before a novel doctrine, good
or bad, can be fully established.

That is what happened with Materialism ; it has
become the leading philosophy of the Western World,
whether acknowledged or not. It has produced its own
cosmogony, its own interpretation of the origin and
nature of man, and therefore its own economic and social
scheme.

As to its cosmogony — that is, its explanation of the
origin and nature of man and of the world in which he
lives — we may take the central and pivotal date to be
the appearance of Darwin’s book, “ On the Origin of
Species ” ; as to the particular social and economic
sememe which went parallel with this, we may take the
contemporary publication of the book “ Das Kapital,”
by Karl Marx.

Let it first of all be emphasized that neither of these
writers is of the first class. They were neither of them
illuminating or creative thinkers ; they were neither of
them original; they were both of them inordinately
lengthy, prosy and dull. They and their books are not to
be cited here as causes ; they were nothing half so re-
spectable ; but they were symptoms. That they should
have had so great a vogue and that so many effects
should be traceable to them is a proof of how consonant
they were to the ambient spirit of their time.

It was just seventy-five years ago that the business
began ; the full fruits of it we are enjoying today.

Charles Darwin was a man who had been steeped
through family inheritance in the conceptions for the
proof of which he gathered great masses of evidence,
falsely applied. He set out to combine two quite
different propositions : first that there existed ample
evidence of transformation from one physical shape to
another in animate nature, so that the most different
forms might proceed from a common ancestor ; secondly,
that this differentation of form proceeded by a very slow
process of minute changes, the cumulative effect of which

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 183

could only be discovered after immense spaces of time,
because each step is the consequence of a blind, purely
mechanical process, wherein no perceptible action of the
will, whether of creator or created, could be discovered.
Hence the title of his book, which is not “ The Origin of
Species,” but “ The Origin of Species by Natural
Selection.”

The first of these hypotheses, called “ Transformism,”
though unproven, is possible or probable. The second,
called “ Natural Selection,” which is the core of the whole
argument, is demonstrably false.

The essential of Darwin’s great haystack of a book,
with its innumerable researches into examples of similarity
of structure suggesting common origins, is not “ evolu-
tion ” — a word which simply means growth and may be
used to mean anything or nothing. No : the essential of
it is the doctrine that living organisms change by the
mechanical effect of survival among those best fitted for
some new condition, and the dying off of the rest.

Some tiny proportion in a particular group of birds
displayed some tiny beginnings of webbing between the
claws ; as the climate grew damper this gave a survival
advantage to the lucky possessors of this exceptional
formation, and their progeny enjoyed increased advantages,
while those who were not so formed had less chance of
surviving. So, at long last — at very long last — a new
kind of bird would appear with fully webbed feet.

This was the essential of a theory insisted upon with
the utmost industry and repetition, that neither the in-
stinct of the animal , still less any flan or will behind the
universe , effected the change ; the whole thing was mechanical
and innocent of design.

The book being typical of the spirit of the time, had,
of course, an immediate popular success ; and the theory
being disastrously simple, appealed to all. It had the
merit of eliminating all necessity for a Creator, and
therefore for responsibility to Him.

In vain were the counter-arguments, which are
sufficient on a brief examination to explode Darwin’s

1 84 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

unproved affirmation, put forward, from Quatrefages
onwards. That all-powerful force called Fashion had
set in and even plain arithmetic was not listened to.*
Neither was the argument from fossils. It ought to have
been self-evident that if this theory were true there would
be before our eyes today an almost infinitely large number
of intermediate forms. Those who defended the theory
said that we did not experience such forms because the
process was extremely slow ; when they were told that
xn that case fossils would give evidence of an almost
infinitely large number of intermediate forms, a per-
petual flux from shape to shape, they answered by saying
that fossils would show this when we had collected enough
of them. By this time we have more than enough and
we know that such a flux has never been, for evidence of it
is absent ; we know that from the earliest ages the fixed
form (often producing other fixed forms) is the rule, and
very slow change by Natural Selection is left without
any evidence to bring into court.

But, I repeat, Fashion is during its brief reign omnipo-
tent ; Darwin was taken for a great man — which, whatever
else he was, he certainly was not — and he was put forward
as having proved what he did not prove. But what he
had done was to supply ammunition for the triumphant
materialist advance, which became omnipresent in the
field of biology and all that is allied to biology, including
the origin and nature of man.

Contemporaneously with Darwin’s appeared the work
of Karl Marx. Here again you get a man who is essen-
tially derivative, with nothing creative or original about
him ; a hanger-on of the French revolutionary thinkers
and particularly attentive to that half-French, half-
Scottish man, Louis Blanc, and an heir to Proudhon,

* A digression on the arithmetical argument alone would be too long to
•et down here ; briefly it can be put thus : The exceptional product of two
exceptionally endowed parent*— rich at a cock and a hen who glory in very
•lightly webbed feet— -diminishes in geometrical progremon with every generation.
If one in a hundred ditplay thi» tiny original advantage, in the next generation
only one in ten thousand will fully thow the benefit, let alone increase it ; and
in the third generation only one m a million.

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 185

of the famous “La propriitt, c’est le vol.” The family
name of Marx was Mordecai, “ Marx ” being one of
those false names, which, whether from fear of persecu-
tion or a dramatic sense, Jews so often adopt. In this
case it was adopted by his family rather than by himself.
He set out to prove with a great mass of examples, just
as Darwin did in his particular department, the bad
history that social transformation was due to blind
mechanical causes, rather than the will of man ; that evil
effects proceeded from material environment and not
from false doctrine or an evil disposition of the mind.
Hence the twin book to “ The Evolution of Species,”
“ Das Kapital,” a Jewish book written in German with
the immense industry, tenacity and sincerity charac-
teristic of his blood, produced for the most part in the
British Museum, for in England Marx lived as an exile
from his native Germany. His work was too long for his
life ; it was completed by his friend and admirer Engels,
and being cosmopolitan in authorship and appeal, was
soon translated into all languages. What Darwin had
supplied to Materialism in biology, Marx supplied to it in
sociology ; and the two combined, not to form as causes
but to present as symptoms, the common Materialism
which in the later XlXth century was to sweep over the
cultivated mind of Europe.

In the particular case of social revolution the effect of
this materialist triumph was to level all obstacles to the
advance of Communism. Communism was the logical
full development of the halting, clouded and variegated
stuff which had been current under the name of Socialism.
All that had prevented the suppressed Proletariat (or
rather their non-Proletanan conscious leaders) from going
“ the whole hog,” had been the remaining strength of
Christendom and the Christian ethic : to put it simply,
the command “ Thou shalt not steal ” ; the remaining
strength of what is native to the Western European man,
a respect for property as the guarantee of human dignity
and freedom. But with the absence of a Divine basis for
them, the moral sanctions failed ; and in the absence of a

1 86 CRISIS OF OUR Cl VI LIZA T ION

moral sanction for property, property could not stand.
Tradition still kept it precariously erect, though ill de-
fended by false theories as materialist as were their op-
ponents. Then came the shock of the Great War.

It is a character proper to all shocks that they tend to
precipitate whatever had been in solution, to realize in
catastrophic fashion whatever had been latent, to relieve
what had hitherto been only urgent and increasing strains.
A shock on so huge a scale as the Great War did this work
instantly and thoroughly ; the Proletariat was not only
shaken into consciousness of its sufferings and chances of
release, but had its sense of opposition multiplied a hun-
dredfold by the agonies of the prolonged conflict.

Already more than half a lifetime earlier a similar
shock on a minor scale had produced the Commune in
Paris ; the outrages and cruel repression of that uprising,
the murder of priests as representing the old morality, the
burning down of public monuments, etc. Now, after the
Great War, the same thing appeared on a much greater
scale in the Russian Revolution. That revolution was led
by a small international clique, largely Jewish in composi-
tion, and energized almost wholly by its Jewish members ;
for in these were found not only an intense motive for
revenge against the old regime, but also cosmopolitan
experience, instruments of secret action and that com-
bination of tenacity, lucidity and strong instincts for
social justice which have made the Jews so formidable a
revolutionary force in one crisis after another in the
West.

At first sight the traveller might have said that Russia
was the worst of all fields in which to begin the experi-
ment of atheist and materialist Communism. Its vast
population, in which the Christians alone were far over a
hundred million, were attached to their ancestral religion
of the Greek or Orthodox type ; they were peasant, and
therefore affected by the evus of modem industrialism
less than many populations of Europe — if indeed they can
be called European. It would seem to be most un-
promising material for what followed ; for what followed

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 187

was the establishment of a Communist regime with all its
characteristics pushed to an extreme ; beginning with
wholesale massacres on a scale hitherto unknown among
Christian men, comparable only to the Asiatic orgies of
the Mongol invaders seven centuries ago.

After this wild riot of universal butchery came a com-
plete scheme for fully despotic control over the human
will by a tiny group of energetic and determined men,
who have since been known as “ The Soviet Govern-
ment.” All private property ceased at a blow, in theory
at least and in law. Its resurrection was rendered
impossible by the refusal of the State to guarantee
inheritance. But it is an utterly false picture which
presents the tremendous event as mainly social and
economic ; it was in the mind and action of its leaders
primarily religious. Their business was to destroy the
Christian name and the spirit of Christ in Society. Even
the teaching of His religion to little children was uni-
versally put down by force. The atheism which was the
driving power of all this was not secret or subsidiary, it was
openly proclaimed and enthroned in the very heart of the
affair.

An effort was made to spread this new materialist
atheism, with its Communist consequence, “ by the
sword ” (as the metaphor goes), that is, by the invasion
of neighbouring countries with consequent further
massacres and the extension of the area of despotic
Soviet control. The process has been excellently com-
pared to the sudden explosion of Mohammedanism in the
early Vllth century. This armed attempt at expansion
was checked by Catholic Poland, the most immediately
exposed victim, in what has been well called “ one of the
decisive battles of the world.”* The Soviet armies were
crushingly defeated just as they were upon the point of
seizing the Polish capital.

As everyone knows, a second flare-up of militant

* The phraie u that of the Engliah poktidan and financier D’Abemon,
Ambattador at Berlin when the battle wai fought and author of a remarkable
book on the battle of Wartaw.

188 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Communism took place in Spain during the months
wherein the present book was being written.

In the Spanish field there appeared exactly the same
symptoms as had appeared in Russia ; massacre, arson,
aespotic control and the rest of it. But there was this
difference, that in Spain the various forces which for very
different reasons supported the national tradition and the
religion thereof took the initiative before things had gone
very far. A revolt by a group of officers in the army
followed by a large proportion of their men (but also
abandoned by a large minority) suddenly struck hard at
the masters of the new revolution. They used all means
to hand, including the Mohammedan troops from Africa,
and were as ruthless in their action as the revolutionaries
had been in theirs, proclaiming their determination to
stamp out “ the bestial Marxian thing.”

The issue is not yet decided. Perhaps before these
words appear in print it may be, so far as Spain is con-
cerned, decided definitely in one way or the other : but
even if it be decided there, it most certainly will not be
universally decided by that one Spanish conflict alone.

A universal battle has to be fought out and as it pro-
ceeds it will be, like all universal battles, based upon
universal philosophies. It will therefore be confused in
many of its issues. There will be strange alliances and
counter-alliances, mixed motives of every moral value
from the basest to the highest, and individuals on either
side following noble aspirations, tangled instincts, and the
basest and most abominable of temptations — from the
satisfaction of mere hatred to the Satanic delight in
cruelty. But while it will be thus muddled and con-
fused, as (I repeat) all universal struggles must be, there
will appear in it none the less, more and more clearly as
the years proceed, the division between the two spirits
utterly ana essentially enemy the one to the other, each
working for the total extinction of the other : Christ and
anti-Christ.

In the cathedral of Cefalu on the north coast of Sicily,
which was built under the first Norman Kings in the

CONSEQUENCES OF REFORMATION 189

early crusading times, there is placed over the half-
dome of the apse a great mosaic representing Christ in
Judgment.

Under it, along the border, runs, in mosaic also, a
motto made up of a Latin hexameter and pentameter.
It is, of course, anonymous ; I have never discovered its
authorship. It runs as follows :

F actus Homo , Factor Homims, Factique Redemptor ,
Corporeus judico, corpora corda Deus.

“ Having been made Man, I, the Maker of Man and
the Redeemer of what I made, judge, having myself
a body, the bodies and souls of men : for I am God .”

It is the complete doctrine of the Incarnation.

Now the Incarnation raises humanity to its highest
conceivable level and is at the same time the central
doctrine of the Catholic Church. They that would
malform, distort, and torture humanity into a mechanical
mould, grinding its very soul, are necessarily at war with
the Incarnation. Herein you may discover the im-
placable hostility between Communism and the Faith :
for it is the function and glory of the Faith to consecrate
and therefore to defend the nature of man.

So much for the immediate, intensely nourished, and
now rapidly rising proposed remedy for the intolerable
evils of Capitalism : the Communist remedy.

But there is an alternative. That alternative is the
remedy of returning to Christian things.

V

restoration

WE have seen how, by a long chain of cause and
effect, Christendom (if it may still be so called)
has arrived at a crisis in which it may founder : that is,
in which the civilization which we associate with all our
past and by which we live may collapse under the
attempted false remedy of Communism. This false
remedy is for the moment the most obvious ; it is the
remedy that appeals immediately, not only to those who
suffer from the injustices and intolerable strain of
Capitalism, but to those generous minds in whom
injustice to others is a sufficient motive for action.
Obviously Communism also appeals as a remedy to the
international revolutionary who first conceived it and
who is directing it.

These three forces combined constitute a very formid-
able power driving the modem Capitalist state, in its
difficulties and approaching collapse, towards Com-
munism. The solution having behind it the honest
enthusiasm of those who protest against injustice, receives
from that source the one invaluable moral ingredient
essential to the success of any movement : spiritual
enthusiasm. For that increasing number of minds which
incline to the Communist experiment, not through any
needs of their own, but in protest against manifest evils,
have a powerful source of inspiration. They are inspired
by the desire to right a wrong ; and a driving force of
that sort, however mistaken the policy which it adopts,
is creative.

Then the second element (which is much the more
apparent in the movement), the proletarian rebellion
against the inhuman conditions of Capitalism, provides
the second factor, numbers.

Wherever modem industrial society has spread,
wherever there is a large transport organization or a
i93

194 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

large organization for mechanical production or a large
financial organization, there you have the overwhelming
majority determined upon the drastic amendment of
the conditions under which they live. The easiest, most
apparent, and most direct path to such amendment
is Communism.

Lastly, you have the directors of the movement,
cosmopolitan, conscious of a clear philosophical position
which is materialist and atheist ; these furnish the staff
work without which no aggressive effort, military or
civilian, can be made. These give the plans and issue
the orders, which are obeyed not only by those who
consciously accept them as orders, but by a much greater
number who follow them by suggestion.

Against so formidable a combination rising in power
every day what are those to do who perceive the peril
it involves ? What alternative shall they propose ?
Manifestly, it will be impossible to achieve anything
without some plan, without a scheme of new institutions.
To tell the sufferer to be patient does not cure his
disease. To continue on the old lines of the social
structure, which has broken down in morals and in
practice, is to invite disaster. What are the new institu-
tions, the new conceptions, guiding those institutions
and creating them, which the reformer who perceives
that Communism is death may advance as a sufficient
remedy for the sickness of the modem world ?

They fall into three main groups, and all these three
are connected at their root by one Catholic philosophy,
which salutary reform must adopt, and lacking which
the remedies proposed will fail.

The three main groups of reform are : First, the better
distribution of property ; secondly, the public control of
monopolies ; thirdly, the re-establishment of those
principles and that organization which underlay the
conception of a Guild.

If we have those three things actively at work — well-
distributed property, strong government controlling the
despotism of monopoly, and co-operative work under the

RESTORATION 195

form of the Guild — our end will have been achieved.
On that triple foundation we can erect a new system
that shall be strong and permanent because it will be
just and because it will be consonant to the nature of
man. We shall have built a state in which men can
live in as much normal happiness as can be expected of
man’s fallen nature and of the temporal conditions by
which he is constrained in this life. We shall have no
paradise, for paradise is not to be re-entered in this
world. We shall not have done with the chief moral
evils of mankind, for these come not from material
conditions or political arrangements, but from the
corruption of the heart. What we shall have done,
however, is to get rid of that unbearable feeling of social
injustice, protest against which threatens to wreck us
altogether.

Here most men would halt, saying : “ Well, if those
three groups of remedies combined are sufficient, let us
set about to apply them. Let us form the rules and even
elaborate the details of institutions which will provide,
and laws which will foster, well-divided property, the
control of monopoly and the Guild. Then our work
will be done, our task achieved.”

Such a conclusion is an error, and an error which
persisted in will prove fatal, because institutions neither
arise of themselves nor are preserved by mere verbal
regulations. Institutions rise from a certain spirit in-
habiting Society, a spirit of which they are the product ;
and they are maintained by men’s acceptance of that
spirit.

In our best time, when there was indeed a good division
of property, control of monopoly, and a flourishing of
the Guild, all the framework of that society grew from a
certain philosophy held strongly in the snape of a re-
ligion. It was the philosophy, the religion of the Catholic
Church.

Therefore does it remain true that we shall only recover
a moral society, secure small property, the control of
monopoly, and the Guild if we also recover the general

196 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

spirit of Catholicism. In other words, you will not
remedy the world until you have converted the world.

It would seem, therefore, that the conclusion of this
study must be : First, an examination in their order of
each of the three main elements in the reform — the
restoration of property, the control of monopoly, the
re-establishment of the Guild ; but after these a co-
ordination of all three within the framework of Catholic
thought, whence indeed they proceed and without which
they can neither be planted nor live.

In other words, we have to end this study by appreci-
ating how the small owner may be brought into being
and survive, how his grand enemy that threatens to
murder him, monopoly, may be curbed, how his co-
operative institutions may reinforce his freedom and
render it stable and prolonged. But, having envisaged
all this, appreciate that the thing will not be done unless
it is inspired by that spirit which made our culture, that

Sirit in the absence of which our culture will die : and
e name of that spirit is the Catholic Church.

The Differential Tax

The restoration of property must have for its instru-
ments regulations making the dissipation of ownership
difficult and the diffusion of ownership easy.

The first in importance of such regulations is the
Differential Tax. With this instrument in hand,
Society, if it has the will, can build small property up
again in spite of the complexity and centralization of
the modem world.

What is needed is a form of tax which not only spares
the small man at the expense of his wealthier rival, but
actually subsidizes the small man where subsidy is
necessary. We have already today differential taxes as
between the big man and the small man. The curve of
taxation rises steeply with the amount of property

S assessed, the income attaching to it, the fortunes which
rge accumulation leaves at death. But we do not use

RESTORATION 197

this advantage for the establishment of economically in-
dependent families. We dtssipate the revenue so gained in
wages and salaries for those in public employment, in usury
on the bank credit to which the modem state is enslaved.
Nothing of the enormous sums gathered by the novel
and drastic claims of the State upon large private fortunes
goes towards the restoration of property.

Now we ought to be using the Differential Tax not
for the raising of wages or the paying of usury to the
banks, but for remaking small property. The claim of
the small-property man is prior to the claim of the state
employee. Still more obviously is it prior to the claim
of the money-lender. The small man will accumulate
by a natural instinct of self-preservation. He does so
in all healthy societies. Such accumulation, such mixture
of industry and saving, mark the free peasant everywhere
in the world. At least they so mark him wherever a
free peasantry has struck root and established strong
traditions.

But there is still a heavy handicap against small savings,
that is, the creation of small capital by accumulation.
The sacrifice required for the denial is far greater in the
small man than in the large man. The small man
foregoes sometimes what are actual necessities, in his
effort to attain economic independence. It may be too
much for him ; as we know. Whole classes of Society
have given up the effort in despair, content rather to
live upon wages controlled by the accumulations of
others than to accumulate for themselves.

Therefore, if we desire to foster small accumulation,
we should subsidize it. We should offer for small
investment, especially when that investment is guaranteed
by the State, easier opportunities than are offered to the
wealthy, and a higher rate of interest. We must be
uneconomic and artificial in the affair.

It may be protested that such a reversal of the common
competitive arrangements is in contradiction with mere
arithmetic. I have myself heard it said, when this reform
was proposed, that the funds could not be found whence

198 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

artificially high interest on small investments could
be paid.

But those who speak thus are themselves sinning
against plain arithmetic. If you examine the statistics
of modem state-financing, what you discover is this :
The State taxes the community and taxes with especial
heaviness the wealthier part of the community, and out
of the proceeds of these taxes it pays interest on the
loans which it has incurred, the advance of credit by the
great banking monopoly which everywhere holds Society
by the throat. But the amount which is thus paid to
the small bondholders, even where these are very
numerous, is insignificant compared with the amounts
which are paid to the larger bondholders, and especially
to the banks, who hold some three-quarters of these
bonds.

A loan subject to, say, 5 per cent, interest, as were
the European loans at the time of the Great War, will
pay the full 5 per cent, interest to the small bondholder,
while after payment of taxation by him the larger
bondholder will receive only 4 per cent, or 3 per cent.
Were you to differentiate the interest as we now differ-
entiate the taxation, were you to give the small bond-
holder up to a certain very low limit, 10 per cent, instead
of 5 per cent., up to another superior limit 8 per cent,
instead of 10 per cent., and so on until the 5 per cent,
level were reached at a point where a still small but
useful accumulation had been created, the equilibrium
of your budget would hardly be disturbed, so prodigious
is the modem preponderance of large accumulation of
capital over small.

It is true that in a society where property was already
well distributed, differentiation in favour of the small
bondholder would be mathematically impossible. There
would not be enough large bondholders from whom the
fund could come. But as Society now is, in the chief
industrial centres, it ought to be self-evident that a
hitherto untried principle of differentiating the returns on
investment as well as differentiating the tax upon revenue

RESTORATION 199

could be undertaken without serious disturbance. Having
been undertaken, your bribing of small accumulation
would be like the swing which starts a motor car on a
cold day. It would set the machinery of small accumula-
tion in motion and rapidly would results grow. Were
you paying even as much as 10 per cent, on the first
£ 100 of accumulation — a proposition which would sound
monstrous in the ears of the orthodox today — the extra
£10 a year per unit would at first hardly affect the
equilibrium of national expenditure. And remember
that every advance after tins tiny minimum until the
level of, say, £1,000 was reached (after which level
differentiation by subsidy might cease) would lessen the
burden upon the public treasury. If you give 8 per cent,
to the first £300, 7 per cent, to the first £500, 6 per cent,
to all between £500 and £1,000, you do not thereby
embarrass the financial machine.

Another reform on the same lines is a differential tax
upon transfer. Where the small man sells to the big man
or the small unit to the big unit, let there be a high tax
upon the transaction, and, the other way about, a low
one. For such a system to work, it would be necessary
to have a register of property. The property of each
citizen or family at such and such intervals of time would
have to be set down. Well, what is the objection to
that ? Such a list already exists when properties are
examined at death. It exists in the English income-tax
in one large category : what is known as “ Schedule A.”
It exists wherever the property takes the form of
registered property in land, and it was the universal
rule throughout Society until quite recent times. In
the Middle Ages every man’s revenue was roughly
known, the rental dues paid to this or that office, this
or that feudal possession were of common knowledge. If
we restored that system today there would be evasion,
of course, as there is evasion by the rich everywhere of
every legitimate demand, but the thing as a whole
would be sufficiently workable to endure and produce
its main effects.

200 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Yet another reform upon the same lines would be a
differential tax on every form of movable enterprise.
There is nothing in the nature of things which makes the
chain store or the big department store a necessity. They
have arisen as an evil consequence of an evil principle —
the principle of unchecked competition. The depart-
mental store kills the small shopkeeper. The chain store
tends to do the same.

The chain store and the department store can be both
curbed and reduced by differential taxation. A licence
issued for the carrying on of such and such a business —
say fishmongering — might cost a nominal sum for the
first enterprise. If a second of the same kind be added
to it, in another place, let the second licence cost far
more. Let the third be so expensive as to be prohibitive,
and the thing is done. Put thus, of course, the scheme
would be unworkable in its crudity, but with proper
attention to details, with elasticity in the rules, the
general principle involved could be applied.

It is in fact applied not by the action of the community
through taxation, but by the action of the com-
munity through public opinion. In many a small un-
spoiled society today a man having a grocery store in a
country town and prospering by his industry and energy
does not offend, but the same man setting out to ruin
a neighbour in the same line of business does offend ;
and we can see before our eyes, at any rate in the Old
World, that in villages and in town units below a certain
size, public opinion is effective in preventing the eating
up of the small distributor by the larger one. A man’s
trade is regarded by that public opinion as his livelihood
and the taking away of a man’s livelihood is not tolerated.

The rules for the better distribution of property under
agricultural conditions are the same as regards the
differential tax on transfer, but not as regards the differ-
ential tax on production. Where a large owner of land
and natural forces buys from the small owner, let the
transaction be made as expensive as possible ; when the
transfer is the other way about, let that transfer be

RESTORATION 201

made as easy as possible. But the differential tax upon
multiplicity of categories does not apply to the land as
it does to the chain store or the big department store.

It will be objected that certain activities necessarily
bear a monopolist character. That is true, and on that
account the policy with regard to them must be a thing
apart and what that policy should be will be later ex-
amined. But the inevitability of monopoly is absurdly
exaggerated in the modern mind. The great monopolies
and quasi-monopolies have come into existence not
because they were in the nature of things and unescap-
able, but because under conditions that restrict com-
petition the smaller unit is heavily handicapped against
the larger.

To return to the case of advertisement. Up to a
certain level the effect of advertisement is hardly appreci-
able. Set up a dozen signs in a large city, and they will
affect no one. But after a certain point the effect
grows in geometric progress indeed until it reaches what
may be called “ saturation.” If you put up a sign on
every building in a large city commanding the citizens
(as is the way of advertisers), or even more politely,
advising them to buy your soap, not more people will
buy it than if you put it up on a quarter of the homes
or even a tenth of them. There is a certain limit
discoverable in practice where advertisement reaches
its “ optimum.” But up to that point the large adver-
tiser has over the smaller man an advantage which
increases in geometric progression.

The moral for those who would preserve or restore
small property is evident : impose a differential tax upon
advertisement, upon its area and its number, and remem-
ber that quite apart from the use of such a tax in social
reconstruction the horrible exaggeration of modern
advertisement is a source of revenue crying out to be
taxed. In some communities such taxation is imposed,
but it is always ridiculously in favour of the big man
against the small one. One of the most remarkable
dumb ironies present to the eye today is the receipt

202 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

stamp which you may discover on any big trade sign in
Paris. In the remote comer of some enormous painted
advertisement on a wall or hoarding you will discover a
tiny square of gummed paper announcing that the
advertiser has paid, say £2 or £$ to the Treasury, though
the advertisement be on a scale which required for its
rental twenty times that sum, and may have for its effect
on the revenue of the advertiser a thousand times that
sum.

All these points which I have here set down are, of
course, tentative. They are suggestions only. They
do not pretend to be a programme.* What is required
is the desire on the part of all sensible reformers to examine
every problem in the light of the opportunities it affords
for the re-establishment of the small owner, the economi-
cally free man. Hitherto we have worked on exactly
opposite lines. Our modem communities hitherto have
left unchecked the natural play of economic forces and
of free competition in favour of the big man. Let us
reverse engines in the mind and change our ideas on
what is desirable, let us come to regard the destruction
of small property as a disaster and die swelling of large
property as a social disease ; then the practical remedies
will come of themselves.

The Decentralization of Ownership

We may postulate, therefore, this truth : as against
Communism, the first alternative reform which those who
would preserve civilization must consider, is the better
distribution of property. The great quarrel engaged
today is a quarrel between the dispossessed and the
possessors, or, as it is often put in the detestable Victorian
jargon, “ the haves and the have-nots.”

Men are in revolt because the possession and control
of the means of production throughout industrial society

* I have sketched the general outlines of what might be a political programme
in the matter. The scheme is to be found in a small book of mine called Tbt
Rtttoratum of Property.

RESTORATION 203

are in the hands of others than those who do the work of
production. They are in revolt because they are divorced
from the implements of their trade and because they are
exploited for the benefit of others. There are for such a
situation only two issues : either to follow the line of least
resistance and turn our inhuman Industrial Capitalism
into that which it already so closely resembles, an inhuman
Communism ; or, to put property and the means of pro-
duction in the hands of those who produce. Not to put
it in their control metaphorically, by calling them “ The
State,” but by putting it in their control actually as
personal or family owners ; owners of machines, owners of
shares, owners of land and buildings. If and when that is
done, Society will be sane and stable again.

Meanwhile it must be emphasized that merely to set
things in motion for such an end, even for trying to
achieve such an end, is of little purpose unless we safe-
guard the victory by making the equitable division of
property stable. No sane man will want equality of
property. No man possessed of some small but sufficient
ownership feels any particular enmity to a man possessed
of somewhat more. Further, there will always be a
tendency to the existence of some dispossessed : to a
margin of society where men are not industrious enough
nor sufficiently self-controlled to preserve their inheri-
tance, however good the safeguards for that inheritance
may be. But the restoration of property is a sufficient
remedy if it applies to a determining number of families in
the state, making property a habit and giving its tone
to the whole community.

Also we need the extension in time as well as in space.
Having achieved a society in which the land ana the
machines and the stores of goods necessary for production
are widely held in several ownerships, we must make that
state of affairs permanent or we shall have done nothing.

Now by what set of regulations is this to be done ?
In some degree, the end is attained by the differential tax
such that it is easier for the small man to buy from the
great than for the great man to buy from the small.

204 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Thus there is a handicap in favour of small property
and against large property.

But there is more needed than that. One must have
continuous institutions bolstering up the thing because
the thing is not “ natural economics.” To establish a
society the members of which, the component families of
which, shall be economically free, is to act against the
unchecked tendencies of the world. It is an artificial
action like cutting dykes and raising levees in order to
drain what would, left to itself, be a marsh. You have
continually to repair the levees and to clean out the
ditches wnich drain the fen. Unless you do that un-
ceasingly the natural conditions return and the reclaimed
land falls back again into bog.

So it is with the maintenance of economic freedom,
that is, well divided property, in any society. Natural
economics, that is, men under conditions of drift and
unorganized in their own defence, cannot preserve it.
Without special regulations to stop him, the larger man
will again begin eating up the smaller man and all the
evils one has got rid of will return.

What, then, are these conservant regulations to be ?

When our society was stable and satisfied in the climax
of the Middle Ages, when it was living in a fashion con-
sonant with right philosophy and human social instincts,
the thing was done by laws of hereditary succession.
The holding of the peasant upon the manor as he
gradually emerged from the slave into the serf and from
the serf into the freeman was preserved for him by un-
breakable custom. The son succeeded to the father, the
holding whether large or small paid only such and such
dues rigidly defined, whether in labour or in kind or in
cash. The free tenants could as a rule, especially
towards the end of the Middle Ages, sell their holdings,
but there was nearly always some local duty or some local
inducement which made such sales rare or difficult.

Within the crafts the property of the craftsman in his
house and workshop ana in the tools of this trade was
guaranteed by custom. There was always a clause

RESTOJtJTION 205

protecting small property in the medieval rules given
for judicial fines ana confiscations. It safeguards the
gear of a farmer, his cattle and horses, wagons and what
not, and is also applicable to the instruments of a craft.
You could not normally distrain on a peasant by selling
the things necessary to his economic independence.
Subject to the difference between modern conditions and
medieval conditions in material things, that principle
should be revived. But, as we shall see on a later page,
the main instrument for the preservation of property in
craftsmanship today must be the Guild. To render
property in the means of production permanent in the
industrial field you must revive the Guild, incorporate it,
and give it powers guaranteed by law.

On parallel lines we must, in any new issue of public
bonds, give preference to the small holder thereof.

There is a further regulation which helps to preserve
small property, and that is restriction of the power of
alienation save within members of a defined group, but
on all this I will touch further when I come to the Guild.
The point to remember is that in any scheme for the
re-erection of well defined property, there must be
included methods for its maintenance as well as for its
inception.

In the effort to restore private property as a general
institution, normal to the family ana giving its tone to the
whole State, we must remember one very grievous
proviso : the task is impossible unless there be still left m the
mass of men a sufficient desire for economic independence to
urge them towards its attainment. You can give political
independence by a stroke of the pen ; you can declare
slaves to be free or give the vote to men who have
hitherto had no vote ; but you cannot give property to
men or families as a permanent possession unless they
desire economic freedom sufficiently to be willing to
undertake its burdens.

This consideration has especially affected our political
problems in England. Many of our public men, at-
tracted to the idea of diffusing property among many,

206

CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

have discovered that the main obstacle lies in the lack
of any desire for such a state of affairs among the wage-
earners. Our wage-slaves have lived under Capitalism
for so long that a secure and sufficient wage is for them the
economic ideal.

This reluctance to undertake the responsibilities of
ownership appears even in the simple matter of a home-
stead ana it is discoverable not only among the wage-
earners, but among the tenant farmers occupied in tilling,
or overlooking the tilling, of our land. You will con-
tinually find that the English tenant-farmer would rather
be under a landlord who can by law turn him out at a
year’s notice, but must be responsible for the upkeep of his
bams and house and enclosures, than be his own master
and have to undertake all this business himself. Nor is
this only a matter of lack of capital. You will find
among us in England any number of men with money laid
out at interest among their neighbours or in government
bonds, which they would not spend upon the buildings
of their farm or upon its main improvements and upkeep.

If the reluctance to own be true, as it is, of a host of
farmers and still more of the agricultural labourers (whose
cottages are rented to them at an uneconomic price — that
is, for much less than their cost would warrant), it is still
more true of the wage-earner in the towns. He has now
lived so long — for some three lifetimes — under the wage
conditions of our great industrial cities that he neither
knows of nor desires any other. Make his livelihood
secure either bv a legal fixed wage or by State subsidy in

Slace of it ana he is content. He is not and does not
esire to be a free citizen.

It is true that Great Britain is an extreme case and that
at her very doors the Irishman acts in an exactly contrary
manner. He is determined on the ownership of his own
land, and at vast sacrifices he has achieved it. In the
Irishman’s case, the determination to be an economically
free man was so strong that he struggled for a century
against the heaviest adverse conditions and at last
achieved his end, even compelling the Bank of England

RESTORATION

207

(which lies behind the whole of our credit system) to
finance the repurchase of his land from those who had
confiscated it generations ago, mainly on the excuse of
religion.

The repurchase of Irish land from the large owners
(who were, in the main, the descendants of the foreign
grantees of Irish soil) was effected in what is called the
Wyndham Act by the issue of interest-bearing bonds
under the guarantee of English credit — that is, virtually,
the Bank of England. The usury as it fell due was to be
paid by the former tenants who thus gradually bought
up the land until it should fall after many such payments
into the full ownership of the occupier.

The political fortunes of this scheme have their own
interest, but only slightly concern our subject. The
instalments payable on the land were duly received by the
former great landowners through the agency of the
British government. There came a moment when the
Irish people refused to transfer the tribute to the English
banking system and kept it in the hands of their own
government, whence arose a quarrel not yet appeased.
Anyhow the point to notice is that because there existed
in Ireland this strong demand for ownership on the part
of the peasantry, ownership was achieved, and because
such a desire does not exist in England, ownership is
there not achieved and is not in process of achievement.

There was, indeed, a considerable purchase of land by
English tenants immediately following on the Great War,
but this was artificial and has come to nothing.

What happened was this : agricultural prices were ex-
ceptionally high on account of the scarcity produced by
the European upheaval. The profits on the tilling of the
land were correspondingly great. The governing class
had, through Parliament, which is its instrument, made
ambiguous promises that this state of things should be
bolstered up. Meanwhile the principal landowners, who
are the members of that class and who were well advised
that the artificial condition could not last, offered the land
to their tenants. These had not the capital wherewith

20$ CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

to pay immediately, so they borrowed credit from the
banks ; when the transfer was accomplished the upshot
of it was that the banking monopoly, with the Bank of
England, of course, at its root, stood in the shoes of the
old landowners — and a class of free peasants owning their
own small farms was further than ever from coming into
existence.

There are no full statistics of the results. Anyone
attempting even to make a rough estimate of what
happened in this considerable economic change finds his
investigation hampered at every turn by the complexities
of conveyance and registration and the secrecy in which
most of the transactions are kept. But the broad fact is
notorious. Some very large proportion of English agri-
cultural land changed hands in the third decade of the
XXth century. Nominally, the transfer was from the old
large landlords to a new class of independent small
proprietors. Actually, the transfer was from the old
large landlords to the banking monopoly, which is in
Great Britain the most stable of institutions and the best
organized in the world.

The Control of Monopoly

In an attempt to provide a human and satisfactory
alternative to Communism as a solution for our modem
ills which Capitalism has produced, the next division is
the control of monopoly.

The capitalist system bom of competition has ended in
the very contradiction of that principle. It used to be
preached in defence of the capitalist system that by its
fundamental doctrine of free competition, production was
rendered more efficient, necessaries and all other goods
were made cheaper, and indirectly the whole common-
wealth thus benefited. The Capitalist in the early
stages of Capitalism did not intend to benefit his fellow
beings, he intended to benefit no one but himself. That
was the very foundation of his creed. But in practice,

RESTORATION 209

it was argued, by leaving his love of gain free play he
would indirectly be the benefactor of all.

For a long time there seemed to be something to be
said for so strange a paradox. Turn greed loose among
men and general content and happiness due to abundance
will be the result. Leave men to prey without restraint
upon their fellow beings and the ma3S would not suffer
from the rapacity thus let loose, but, on the contrary,
benefit from it. Thus a railway would be built between
two towns by a group of Capitalists. Another group
would build an alternative route, the two would compete
and their competition would lower the rates to a mini-
mum. At the same time greed would lead to every kind
of discovery for the betterment of communications, the
machinery of transport would continually improve, and
so forth.

Give full license to any distributor of goods, say a
grocer, to undercut the competitor at will, to fix his own
prices, even at the ruin of a neighbour smaller than him-
self, and in the long run you would produce a more
efficient, a stronger, a better public grocery service.
For quite a lifetime all this apparently held true, but the
inevitable happened ; greed thus let loose produced
monopoly. The large producers and the large distribu-
tors made mergers among themselves, or, failing that,
established agreements in the restriction of competition.
Prices were fixed between them, and these monopolies,
once established, dominated the community.

Their mastery is now quite patent and admitted. It is
not universal. A very large field of competition remains,
affecting considerable units and even in small businesses
a certain measure of vitality has survived, but the ten-
dency to monopoly is continually at work, monopoly
continually advances, and it is clear that if the process be
not checked we should end in no very long space of time
by the great mass of production, distribution, and
exchange falling into the control of comparatively few
men who would thus be necessarily the masters of the
community. As it is, the private citizen is already

2io CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

helpless against these controls in the larger part of his
activities. The great bulk of what he must purchase, he
must purchase at a price, and, what is worse, after a
fashion and according to a design, laid down for him by
others. Demand no longer controls supply in most
activities of English life, rather does supply order and
enregiment demand.

It may be said that in part this is due to mass pro-
duction and the use of machinery with that object.
This is true, but more important is the action of the whole
on monopoly. “ Competition has done its work,” you,
will hear thinking men say on all sides, especially those
who are content with the upshot of the affair. And if
there be no further development and no change-over to
the control of monopoly by public powers, not only will
competition have done its work and have ceased, but its
successor, monopoly, will be the master of the
commonwealth.

Another way of putting this was that set of phrases
common upon the lips of Socialists a generation ago, to
which allusion has already been made — “ Let the big
businesses grow ; the nearer they become to monopolies
the more easily shall they be taken over by the State.”
The idea of Socialism arose, as we have seen, through
the conception of all monopolies merging in one great
monopoly, that of the State.

The defenders of economic liberty, who are also
necessarily the defenders of private property as a principle,
dreaded and combated this result. But they did nothing
to stop it. For by their own theory as it was propounded
in the capitalist age, they had to defend competition and
in so defending it, defended that which would inevitably
lead to monopolist control at last.

Therefore, when it was proposed that public law
should put some check upon the growth of monopoly, a
cry against government interference was raised m the
name of freedom. The more intelligent of those who
raised this cry knew very well that the prevention of
common action against monopoly by the State would

RESTORATION 21 1

work in their favour alone. They used the principle
that the State should interfere as little as possible, but
they used it in order that they should acquire for
themselves such political and economic power as it was
the business of Society to prevent. Meanwhile the old-
fashioned economist, living in the traditions of the past,
continued to denounce State interference, which he
confused with that Socialism it was his business to
combat.

The strange alliance between these two ill-assorted
allies, the old-fashioned liberal and the modern
monopolist, resulted in the prodigious growth of the
latter until today he is in every department, but especially
in transport and finance, a master.

Now it is imperatively necessary, if well-divided
property is to come into existence again and to be
maintained, that monopoly should be dealt with according
to two main principles which we must bear clearly in
mind.

The first principle is this : Everything must be done to
check the growth of monopoly , to interfere at the beginning
of its appearance and to disperse its forces. In so far as
this can be done by voluntary co-operation among the
citizens let it be thus done, but seeing what the power
of wealth is, especially in our modern urban communities
and more particularly through the control of the Press
and the corruption of politicians, voluntary co-operation
can have no such effect as the action of the State. Let
State action — that is, let laws or guild regulations
supported by the power of the State — prevent the
beginnings of monopoly wherever it may appear and
make such arrangements that it cannot grow.

The second principle is this : Where monopoly is
practically inevitable, there let State control and even, where
necessary , State ownership, take the place of private control
and private ownership.

A Socialist of the old school, the leader of his party in
Belgium, said half a lifetime ago : “ Since monopoly is
inevitable, let it be taken over by the commonwealth

212 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

lest we all become the servants of a few rich men.”
There was a truth in this but it was a half truth.
Monopoly is not inevitable in itself, it is inevitable only
under certain conditions. Men often talk as though it
were an inevitable product of machinery or rapidity of
communication or what not. That is an error of the
time in which we live, a time in which men have forgotten
the truth and function of free will and in which, on the
parallel of popular scientific materialism, it is imagined
that human Society must follow rigidly the force of
things, undetermined by human choice. Men see
monopoly existing all round them and growing every day.
They take it for granted that there is therefore no choice
in the matter, that we must submit to the evil and bear
it as best we can.

Now, no monopoly is inevitable in the absolute sense
of that word; not even the most apparently obvious.
No monopoly comes into existence save by the acceptation
of those who submit to it. A monopoly is often cheaper
and more precise and accurate in its working, and more
rapid as well, than would be a number of competing or
partly competing units. It may, therefore, be chosen by
the consumers of its product in preference to the product
of lesser units. But there is no monopoly which either
public opinion or direct action of government cannot
destroy if we are willing to pay the price. For instance,
that most obvious of all monopolies, the national postal
system. If for some reason men could not tolerate the
monopolist power of that one function they could do
without it. Their post would be delivered much less
regularly and less swiftly — that is the price they would
have to pay — but it is not true to say that the monopoly
is inevitable. A law or the separate action of free men
could destroy it. That is true of every monopoly under
the sun and of every tendency to monopoly.

In practice, however, monopoly does come into
existence especially under modern conditions. Some
monopolies have existed from the beginning of human
society. For instance, the monopoly of main communi-

RESTORATION

213

cation throughout any one society. There is no society
so primitive but that its roadways or tracks must be
kept up. And though it leave each petty unit — parish
or township or what not — to keep up its own section of
a track or road, there must be some co-ordinating
authority however simple, otherwise continuity of com-
munication would break down. One cannot leave it to
the local man to repair a bridge, for instance, at his
own good pleasure. If one did that he could hold up
the community, or even by mere laziness destroy its
transport.

In a highly complex society, such as ours has become
today, the examples of what may be called “ natural
monopoly” greatly increase in number. There can be
a certain amount of competition, for instance, between
various groups of railroads, but our transport would
become impossible if a great number of these acted in
mere competition and independence one of another.
Again, there are a large number of activities where the
concentration of control in one centre makes the cost
of production so enormously cheaper than it would be
in many small centres, that the tendency to concentration
is overwhelming.

The major example of this in modem times is, of
course, the centralization and monopoly of bank credit,
on which under modem conditions much the most of
production, distribution, and exchange depends. It is
true there are societies in which the creation of bank
credit is much freer than in others. It is most centralized
and most an absolute monopoly in Great Britain, on
which account British banking is the most efficient in
the world and also the most tyrannical. Where the
creation of bank credit is permitted to a large number of
independent centres, the instability of the banking
system must evidently be greater. Where it is, as in
England, virtually under one central control, its stability
is at a maximum. Now of all monopolies, this one —
that of bank credit — most urgently demands public
control. Unless public authority is the master of that

214 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

particular force, that force will be the master of the
community. Society will fall into that worst of all
conditions — not worse for order but worse for its ultimate
fate and its morals — power divorced from responsibility.
We have had in the capital field of foreign policy a major
example of this during the last few years. It is an
example which everybody should mark, especially as it
has been carefully hidden.

Great Britain went to war in order to prevent the
German Reich from building a fleet that could rival her
own. After the war the Victors’ Alliance, which included
Great Britain, laid it down that the Reich of the future
should have no fleet worth calling a fleet. It was, from
the point of view of Great Britain, the chief fruit of the
common victory. But the Reich was kept in being
(principally by the support of Great Britain), because it
was thought to be, on land, a counterbalance to the
land power of France, and it has been and must be the
permanent policy of Great Britain to keep the land forces
of the Continent divided and in rivalry.

So far so good. The Bank of England, and with it
those who control the issue of bank credit from England,
saw in the impoverishment and exhaustion of the Reich
through war and defeat an opportunity for placing great
loans to Germany at enormously high interest.

It was taken for granted on the experience of the past
and without considering the complete change of
conditions produced by the Great War, that a promise
to pay by any considerable modem government was
equivalent to actual security for payment. Every effort
was made by the Bank of England — and most successfully
made — to prevent the occupation of German territory
as a guarantee for the payment of reparations. It never
occurred to the money-lenders — more accurately the
credit-lenders — that, unless they occupied territory they
would have no security for the repayment of the vast
usury which they expected on the advances made. To
take but one example out of a great number : the City
of Berlin borrowed from London at io per cent, for

RESTORATION 215

municipal purposes. The 10 per cent, was really more
like 12 when all the frills and commissions had been
allowed for. The usurers did not doubt for a moment
that the promise of the City of Berlin to pay £12 a year
for every £100 worth of credit extended would be kept.
In the past, such payments had always been made by
Great Powers and when lesser countries defaulted they
were as a rule coerced by the fleets and armies at the
disposal of the lenders.

We all know what happened. In a very short time
the Germans refused to pay the interest while keeping
the material goods and services which were the product
of the credit extended to them. One of the main uses
to which they put this advantage which had been given
them with such enormous lack of political judgment by
the English banking monopoly was to set about building
a new fleet. Today the taxpayer of Great Britain has
to find usury on vast new sums of credit extended to
Germans by his own English banking monopoly in order
that the Germans may build a new fleet. The English-
man has to pay all right ; the banking monopoly is sure
of its money in his case ; but the English money advanced
in German loans has gone down the wind. It will never
be recovered. The English banks have rebuilt a new
Germany rather than a new England.

The whole thing is perhaps the most signal example
of the stupidity of mammon which history can afford.
First the English people are burdened with taxation
beyond all known precedent in order to destroy a rival
fleet ; the wealthier citizens are mulcted of, all told
(counting death duties and income-tax and every form
of impost) between half and three-quarters of their
fortunes, of which sums a great proportion goes to usury
on the credits of the Great War : and now a further
proportion is to go in usury on credits provided to meet
a rival whom the English have themselves rearmed !

That example is taken from foreign policy and is so
glaring that no other is needed. But the power of
monopoly and financial control is not confined to foreign

21 6 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

policy. You find it in every detail of the national life.
Bank credit granted or withheld makes or unmakes any
enterprise ; bank credit being naturally attracted towards
large enterprise rather than small, supports the growth
of the large unit against the small one and makes for the
continual increase of that ill distribution of property
which is our main modem political and social evil.

Now of all monopolies the financial monopoly is that
which most naturally comes into being, and, having once
done so, is most difficult for any power but that of the
government itself to master. It is the most natural to
come into being because it is a field in which the large
unit most easily swallows up the small and in which
communication is easiest. You can transfer millions of
bank credit from one end of the world to the other, by
a few cabled words. You can create and put into action
a mass of bank credit in, say, Yokohama, at the will of a
small group of men in, say, Paris or the City of London
at a moment’s notice. Such fluidity does not apply to
any other form of economic activity.

But the strongest motive for the control of this
monopoly by the State still remains the power of that
monopoly to control the State itself unless the State
determines to be its own master and to make financial
credit its servant. You will never have safeguard for
well-divided property nor for the freedom of economic
activity in Society until central credit is controlled by
the officers of the whole community.

We have seen that modern conditions do make for the
growth of monopoly if not inevitably, yet certainly by
very strong tendencies. But when all these are allowed
for, it remains true that the bulk of modern monopoly
or quasi-monopoly is not the result of always irresistible
economic forces but simply the result of leaving great
bodies of wealth free to attack and destroy lesser units.

We all know what the weapons are which the greater
unit can use for the destruction of its lesser rival. We
have already seen how much more proportionally effective
is an advertisement in the hands of the greater unit. Up

RESTORATION 21 7

to a certain degree of enlargement all overhead charges
are reduced by concentration under one control. The
actual instruments used are often proportionally less
expensive on a large scale than on a small — and so on.

The Guild

Now for the prevention of this evil, the growth of
monopoly, whether the production or distribution
through the unchecked play of the larger unit against
the smaller, there is but one effective instrument. It
was the instrument discoverable in the very origins of
Society and proved by our fathers in the Middle Ages.
It was only destroyed when the social philosophy of
Catholic times was ousted by a false social philosophy
following on the Reformation : and that instrument is
the guild. The guild is that instrument whereby any
form of human economic activity can work corporately
and yet, at the same time, with the recognition of human
dignity and the function of human free will.

The essential of the guild-idea is that of men pursuing
the same form of activity, but only in co-operation
limited to the end of preserving the economic freedom —
that is the property and livelihood — of each member of
the guild.

The function of the Guild is not to prevent a man from
prospering in some economic activity wherein he shows
merit and industry ; its function is to prevent the man
so prospering from taking away the economic basis of
one or more of his fellows for nis own advantage.

The function of the Guild is not to support the guilds-
man in a war against the rest of Society or in struggling
against some other section of Society : it is to strengthen
the guildsman as an individual and as the head of that
unit of all Society — the family — so that he may hold his
own against the threat of too heavy a competition from
his fellows or of oppression by economic activities external
to his own.

Where the economic activity of a Guild requires

218 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

instruments of a certain cost the Guild sees to it that
those instruments are not gathered up into the control
of a few hands. Where that competition is necessary it
is the business of the Guild to supervise the arrangement
of it and to see that under it the lesser man is not
destroyed by the greater man. It is also the function of
the Guild to fix prices for the Guild product, lest the
Guild should exploit unduly its fellow citizens outside
its own jurisdiction. Lastly, the Guild must, as I have
said, defend its own corporation against the undue
pressure of other corporations. The Guild itself is but
one member of a commonwealth of Guilds, as it were,
the network of which should cover any well-organized
state in which men aim at founding and preserving
economic freedom for the individual and the family.

These are abstract principles. Let us put them in
concrete form for the sake of giving them substance.
There are a number of grocers in the community. If
these grocers and their businesses are organized in a
Guild, the Guild will set a limit to the business which
any one grocer can do. It need not be a very rigid
limit. There is certainly no necessity here for equality,
which, we can repeat now as throughout all our examina-
tion of economic conditions, is neither feasible nor by
the mass of men desired in economic affairs. But the
Guild would set a limit such that the least of its mem-
bers should at least have a livelihood. It would forbid
any one of its members even the most prosperous
from threatening the livelihood of lesser guildsmen.

In the Guild system there could not take place, for
instance, the spectacle which I have before my own eyes
in London. In that town there exists a respectable and
important grocery business which the same family has
conducted for three generations. It supplies a certain
restricted but fairly well-to-do neighbourhood, has pro-
vided a good and slowly increasing income for those who
manage it. One of these combinations called today
“ chain stores,” finding this private-family grocery
business supplying the locality, bought up a property

RESTORATION 219

next door to it, set up one of the innumerable grocery
.units in their possession, and proceeded to undersell the
old-established shop in order to drive it out of business.

That sort of thing is going on all over the country.
It is incidental to the chaotic economic condition in
which we live, and if no control is established it will
end by destroying family businesses altogether. Now
under a Guild system that would be impossible. A man
could not open a grocery shop unless he were an accepted
member of the Guild, for the Guild would be chartered
by law for its members to pursue certain activities which
would be legally forbidden to those not members of the
Guild. He could not undersell because within certain
limits prices and profits would be fixed by the Guild.
He could not even wantonly and maliciously set up
competition at the very doors of another Guildsman for
that would bring him before the court of the Guild
which would fine him heavily for such iniquitous action.

Take another instance. A man requires for his
carpenter’s shop certain instruments to the value of, say,
£S°°- Another larger concern dealing perhaps with a
more complicated form of product will want a shop the
instruments wherein are worth, say, £800. Another
smaller man will require only £200 of such capital.
There comes along a discovery which permits some
particular kind of carpentry work to be done much
better and more quickly and more cheaply by a new
instrument, but that instrument costs £4,000. It is
beyond the means of any one individual Guildsman. The
Guild as a corporation provides it, oversees its use and
the distribution of its product among the Guildsmen in
proportion to their standing within the Guild. The
Guild has already seen to it that no one Guildsman shall
be so great as to destroy the livelihood of another; the
productive property among the Guildsmen, though not
equally distributed, is at least sufficiently distributed for
each to be an owner, and now, according to their assess-
ment as Guildsmen, they share in the product of the
new instrument.

220 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

Tale another case — a unit in which little movable
property is required — a Guild of lawyers or doctors, for
instance. It will make rules forbidding certain forms of
competition which it regards as dangerous to the in-
dependence of its members. We have already in most
professions rules of this kind existing as customs enforced
by the opinion and co-operation of members of the
profession. Let such rules be chartered and legally
enforceable, and the full professional Guild will come
into existence.

It would be easy to fill all my pages with nothing but
the consideration of this fruitful, elementary, and
essential economic structure. Our ancestors enjoyed it
for centuries ; it was the prime economic institution of
the State ; relics of it still existing among us testify to
its value (for instance, the Waterman’s Guild of the
River Thames in London). In our efforts at economic
reform, which shall recover for Society its health and
content, the formation of the Guild is essential.*

In conclusion, let us emphasize the four marks of the
Guild. Each of them is vital to its existence, each
necessary, and each workable when men are once accus-
tomed to the idea and to its practice.

The first principle is this : the Guild must be self-
governing, making its own rules, admitting members on
terms which it itself devises, fixing the price of their
products of activities, judging the work done so it does
not fall below a certain standard, forming arrangements
whereby corporate action by many Guildsmen may be
undertaken where something needs to be done which is
beyond the means of the individual Guildsman. This
character of self-government should include some central
meeting place for office work and for the intercom-
munion of members, and a system of these centres could
be established, nation-wide.

The second principle is that the Guild, like any other

* The reader may coniult the work* of the late Mr. Penty on thil (ubject.
They are luad, thorough, and illuminating, eipecially where they deal with
the Just Prut at eitabluhed by the Guild

RESTORATION 221

living organism, must be limited. The numbers which
may- practise within it must in the first instance be
decided by the self-governing Guild itself — that is, the
governing organs and officers of the Guild. But only in
conjunction with the authorities responsible for the whole
State, otherwise a Guild might use its monopoly to the
prejudice of Society around it. There is never a danger
of such limited and privileged bodies becoming too large
— the danger is always of their becoming too small, and
therefore the State must have the power to revise the
numbers of each in order that the needs of Society may
be satisfied. The same rule applies to the prices fixed
by the Guild. For the general goods of Society there
must be some central social authority which will decide
where the Guild by its set of prices is unduly exploiting
the community.

The third principle is that of property. A Guild must
of its very nature be a Guild of oumers. The individual
and the family are otherwise deprived of that very
economic freedom which it is the object of the Guild to
maintain. A Guild organized on a communistic basis is
a contradiction in terms.

Supposing, for instance, you have a general transport
Guild divided into numerous branches. Supposing one
of the branches is the Guild operating such and such a
railway. Your individual Guildsmen or their families
would not own, the one a locomotive, the other a truck,
a third a station. The thing has only to be stated to
show its absurdity. But the stock in the affair should
be owned by the members thereof. Where in the nature
of things (and a railway is an example of that) the unit
is large, self-government is difficult in proportion to its
size, and the measure of State administration in the
control must be proportionally larger. Yet the element
of self-government can be actively present. The various
branches of activities in a railway system should each
have its departmental charter, meeting, voting distribu-
tion and the rest, with central organs for the supervision
and co-operation of the whole corporation.

222 CRISIS OF OUR C1V1L1ZA T I ON

The fourth principle is perhaps the most important
of all. If we are to prevent the arising of a Proletariat,
which evil it is the whole object of the Guild to prevent,
we must have hierarch/. Hierarch/ is essential to all
human affairs, an/how. It is as essential to the manage-
ment of a Guild as to the management of an/ other
social organism. There must be hierarch/ of office and
of duties. But in the particular function of the Guild
and especiall/ of the craft Guild you must have another
hierarch/ in the sense of a distinction between the
postulant and the admitted member.

That is the conception underlying the ancient and
invaluable institution called apprenticeship. By it the
Guild is renewed, its continuity maintained, and not only
its continuity but its excellence, its aptitude for doing
the work it exists to do. The Guddsman naturally
desires his son, or, if the activities of the Guild are
expanding then two or more of his sons, to enjoy the
privileges of freedom and ownership which he has himself
enjoyed. He proposes them as postulants — that is, as
young men envisaging full membership in the Guild.
In that class and with that character they are admitted.
They are subject to the authority of the superiors trained
in the work, and only after admission to full competency
given their full degree. The old term for that last state
was “ Master.” Thus as the individual members die
off they are renewed, the organism as a whole continually
reproduces itself, and its aptitude for its function is
guaranteed.

The Guild cannot be restored, of course, upon a fixed
programme. No human thing can thus be brought into
existence mechanically. It must feel its way into
existence once more as it did when it was first formed
in the earliest ages of mankind and particularly when it
was at its highest and most useful — in the Middle Ages.
But the idea is so consonant to man and so obvious a
need of our present distracted economic society, that
it has only to be stated and vigorously preached to
make headway.

RESTORATION

223

Conversion

Even when one has most fully considered in its details
the policy required for the restoration of property, and
of consequent economic freedom as an alternative to
Communism, there remains a qualification or proviso
attaching to that policy. It is of such a fundamental
character that it determines the whole. Lacking it, the
policy is certainly foredoomed to failure ; recollecting
it and working upon it, and only so, the policy may
succeed.

This proviso or qualification is the re-establishment in
our midst of the Catholic culture and for that purpose
the advancement, up to and beyond a certain necessary
minimum limit, of Catholic numbers and practice in
the community. So much being said, let me define the
terms of this proposition.

In the first place, a conversion to the Catholic culture
is necessary to the restoration of economic freedom
because economic freedom was the fruit of that culture
in the past. The Guild, the co-operative agricultural
system, the whole network of safeguards for family
property — all these things which we have seen in the past
and propose as a programme for the future — came out of
the Catholic culture which was itself the product of
Catholic doctrine.

It was the Faith which gradually and indirectly trans-
formed the slave into the serf, and the serf into the free
peasant. It was the Faith which took the Guild, in-
herited from the Pagan Empire, and set it up for the
foundational thing it was during all the great medieval
period : the guarantee of freedom. It was the Faith
which by its moral atmosphere checked and curbed
usury — that usury whereby Pagan Society, before the
triumph of the Church, had been thoroughly sapped
and which today is sapping ours. It was the Faith
which put competition within its bounds and made its
limited practice subservient to general well-divided

224 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

property, where its excess would have divided Society
into very many destitute and few possessors. It was the
disruption of Catholic unity in Europe which let in all
the evils from the extreme of which we now suffer and
are therefore in peril of dissolution.

We cannot build up a society synthetically, for it is
an organic thing ; we must see to it first that the vital
principle is there from which the characters of the
organism will develop. You will not be able to set up
in a pagan or an heretical or a wholly indifferent society
the institutions characteristic of economic freedom ; you
will not be able to curb competition which alone would
be sufficient to destroy such freedom nor pursue per-
manently and consecutively any one part of the pro-
gramme. The thing must be done as a whole and it
can be done as a whole only by the ambient influence
of Catholicism.

Briefly, we must begin by aiming at the conversion of
Society, failing which no scheme of stable economic
freedom will stand. We came, remember, out of slavery ;
our society was once wholly based on slavery, and to
slavery it is returning. Defence against such a fate there
is none but the general counter-action of Catholicism.

So much for the first point. The second point is this :
A Catholic culture does not mean or imply universality.
A nation or a whole civilization is of the Catholic culture
not when it is entirely composed of strong believers
minutely practising their religion, nor even when it
boasts a majority of such, but when it presents a deter-
mining number of units — family institutions, individuals,
inspired by, and tenacious of, the Catholic spirit.

This doctrine of the Determining Number has already
appeared in these pages. It is essential to the com-
prehension of any political and social movement, and
must first be again clearly grasped before we proceed to the
further points of method in Conversion.

The Determining Number in any matter is discovered
by experience and inspection ; it is not arrived at by
any general, still less by any mathematical, rule.

RESTORATION 225

For instance, in the case of rare events, a very small
number is sufficient to have a determining effect.

A district in which there falls every ten years or so a
violent earthquake is a district where earthquakes take
place in a determining number. The whole time occu-
pied by shocks in a century, if you added it up together,
would perhaps come to less than an hour ; yet without
doubt some island known to be subject to such exceptional
catastrophes though only once every few years for a few
minutes at a time would be an island regarded by all
men as specially cursed with this kind of misfortune.

A particular long street in a city where half a dozen
murders occurred in the course of a year and then
again in the course of the following year, and so on,
would be notorious ; it would reek of murder, though
the total number of homes involved might not even be
five per cent, of the total inhabiting the street.

At the other extreme, where you are dealing with
things normal to a man in every situation of life, a
determining number connotes a very large proportion
of the community. We call a society negroid only when
a very large proportion of African blood is present.
Even in things which are not normal to man, which are
not to be expected of men everywhere, such as racial
characteristics, but particular habits general to a society,
this rule obtains. The determining number must be a
large one — how large only experience and inspection can
decide. Nor will it ever be an exact number but always
something lying between certain limits.

In the case of a religion, or rather of a religious
atmosphere, the prime condition of the determining
number is that it should impose its texture or colour
upon Society as a whole. It is probable that in the
greater part of the Middle Ages the greater part of men
in the greater part of Christendom practised their
religion very little or not at all. But there was no
corresponding negative influence ; the positive influence
radiating from those who were intensely practising to
an outer fringe among whom practice had decayed even

226 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

to extinction, gave to the England, France, Spain,
Germany and Italy of the time a character wholly
Catholic.

These things being so, what are the methods by which
we may attempt the task of restoring this general Catholic
atmosphere to the modem world ?

Let us begin with estimating the forces opposed to us
and the forces in our favour. Those forces differ accord-
ing to whether we are considering a nation of ancient
Catholic culture such as France today, divided upon
religion ; or one of those nations, such as Sweden or
England, which broke away from the Catholic unity at
the moment of the Reformation and lost the traditions
of Europe. Or again, one of those nations such as
Holland, in which, while the government and most of
the wealth is non-Catholic or anti-Catholic, there is a
very large minority— soon perhaps to be one-half — of
Catholic citizens. There is also a separate case altogether,
to which the United States belong: a nation which
was founded and grew up from a moment when the
disruption of Christendom had long taken place ; a
nation which had at its origins an overwhelmingly
predominant anti-Catholic or non-Catholic tradition and
social habit — later modified by Catholic immigration.

The forces working for Catholic restoration and
against Catholic restoration are very different both
in character and proportion in these various forms of
Society.

In the nations of old and continuous Catholic culture,
of which France may be taken as the leading example,
Society is now divided somewhat sharply into the Catholic
and non-Catholic ; but the anti-Catholic part of France
or Italy derives its tradition not from the Reformation
but from direct reaction against Catholic discipline and
authority. It is not hostile to traditional Catholic
morals ; on the contrary, it is, even when it least knows
it, steeped in Catholic philosophy and the direct results
thereof ; but it is in active rebellion against the discipline
of the Church and has abandoned faith in her primary

RESTORATION ziy

doctrines — even that of immortality, and latterly even
that of one creative God.

This antagonism is generally called in the nations of
Catholic culture by the name of “ anti-clericalism.”
Properly this name belongs rather to a political attitude
which watches with jealousy and suspicion any excess of
power of the clergy in civil and political matters, but in
practice it has come to mean the distinction between the
anti-Catholic in the nations of Catholic culture, and his
fellow citizen who, whether personally practising or not,
leans by sympathy towards the Catholic Church and all
its traditions.

In the nations which broke away in the XVIth century,
notably in Prussia* and England, which are the two great
examples of Protestantism, the dislike and hatred of
Catholicism varies in degree from one to another ; but
the hatred and ignorance are commonly allied. Great
Britain is the country where the dislike of Catholic things
is the strongest, and where at the same time the memory
of them has most thoroughly died out. In the Germanies
and even in Prussia proper there is a great knowledge of
Catholicism, both because Germans respect historical
learning, and because something like one-half of the
German race retained the Faith, so that the common
German language and whole body of German social
habit is shared by Catholic and non-Catholic alike.

Both these divisions in Europe, Catholic and anti-
Catholic, have this in common, that either was founded
and formed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages ;
those who broke away from Catholic unity still preserve
some memory, and many ruins, of their Catholic past ;
those who did not break away, even where the anti-
Catholic feeling is strongest, are fully conscious of the
Catholic past, between which and themselves there is
no breach of continuity.

* I am here using the word “ Prussia ” to mean old Prussia, before the
annexation of the Rhineland, The Rhenish provinces of the Reich are, of
course, in the main Catholic , they are not attached by their traditions to
Prussia proper, centred m Berlin, which capital and district is and has been
for centuries the Continental centre of anti-Catholicism.

228 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

When we are dealing with the New World, and in
particular with the United States, we come across a
completely different state of affairs. From the begin;
ning this society or community was anti-Catholic in
character ; it was at first overwhelmingly so ; later that
condition was modified, but this was accounted for by
immigration much more than by any other factor, and
the Catholic immigrants were poor.

Now in the history of all nations the control of wealth

Profoundly affects the development of the social world.

'he ownership of the land and of the reserves of wealth,
the control, that is, of capital and therefore of industry,
lay in the main with the families of Protestant descent,
English, Scottish and Dutch. These continued to give
the tone to the commonwealth. Apart from that, the
numerical position of Catholics in the mass of Society
was always inferior. There was a whole lifetime during
which it rapidly grew ; but the Catholics of North
America were still a minority living in the midst of a
society the general tone of which derived from the
Reformation and in a large degree from Calvinism.

These divisions exist ; they modify, as I have said, the
nature and the proportion of the forces working for and
against a general restoration of the Catholic culture.
Thus in one society the forces of nationalism (as in
England) will be fiercely opposed to such a restoration ;
while elsewhere (as in France) the force of nationalism,
once semi-hostile, is now upon the whole favourable to
a restoration of the Catholic air. But of every modern
society of whatever complexion within our civilization,
certain main forces appear hostile to that recovery of
the Catholic atmosphere without which our culture
must perish.

There is in favour of our restoration the whole volume
of history ; the myths and falsehoods of official history
whether anti-clerical in Catholic countries or nationalist-
Protestant in others, are opposed to us, but the whole
body of historical truth is with us. It is an historical
truth which has only to be examined to be admitted.

RESTORATION 229

that our civilization was made by the Catholic Church
and that its fullness and sanity have depended upon the
maintenance of the Catholic framework.

Similarly there are opposed to us a number of irrational
associations of ideas, such as the association of ideas
between anti-Catholicism and the cause of social justice,
or the association between the progress of physical science
and the progress of scepticism. In this department, as
in the department of history, knowledge is on our side ;
all that we have to combat is ignorance. Therefore we
hold trump cards. But the greatest strength of the
trumps we hold lies in the consonance between Catholic
morals (the fruit of Catholic doctrine) and the
discoverable nature of man. Men can pragmatically
discover that through the Faith human things return.
Their despair in the absence of the Faith is the strongest
asset we have.

Opposed to our effort in countries mainly anti-Catholic
by tradition (and with these alone we are here dealing —
countries founded and governed by men who were born
out of contact with the Catholic Church and largely
hostile to it by tradition) are two forces so different that
it is a puzzle to connect them ; yet one does find them
acting together : the force of ignorance and the force
of distaste.

It might seem more rational that one should hate only
what one knows, or even dislike only what one knows ;
but in point of fact men often particularly dislike some-
thing of which they know very little.

The reason would seem to be that men hate mainly
through one particular contact.

Thus, though of the innumerable facets of the human
character, we come across in some person but one, and
that one distasteful, we may well conceive a dislike for
the whole character, through that one most imperfect
experience. So it is with the attitude of non-
Catholic societies towards the Catholic Church. They
will find themselves in reaction against the strong
organization of the Church, the unfamiliar external

230 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

“ clothing ” of the Church, its liturgy in an ancient
tongue, its ornaments, and what not ; very often they
find themselves in reaction against its claim to authority —
more often still against its alien or cosmopolitan manner,
contrasting with their own narrower national traditions.
But whatever the explanation, the main fact we have to
consider in approaching our problem is the combination
of ignorance and dislike. We are attempting to extend
the Catholic atmosphere over multitudes who in varying
degrees know not, and dislike, the Faith. We aim at
permeating with Catholic culture a whole Society the
culture of which is still both unfamiliar with, and hostile
to, that culture.

It is clear that in such an effort the method to be
pursued and the instruments to be used will be very
different from those to which men turn in a country of
ancient Catholic tradition. In the one, a still existing
and strong, an active, philosophy has to be reinforced
until it shall again permeate the social mind ; that is the
way one has to work, for instance, in France or among the
intellectual middle class in Italy, or among the desperate
and angry proletarian population of certain Spanish
towns. But with societies of Protestant origin and type
it is otherwise ; how are we to set to work there ?

As it seems to me, the strategy required may be summed
up in two titles : Print and Programme.

It behoves us to make the Church known, her doctrines,
her whole spirit, her past — the thing itself, the personality
— by the medium of Print. And it behoves us to give
body to our effort, to provide it with a concrete end, to
sustain it with a conscious task, by presenting a Pro-
gramme (in politics they call it a “ Platform ”) wherein
may be discovered a solution for the grave, the now almost
mortal, ills which Society is suffering through an
abandonment of the Faith.

It may here be objected that I am talking of very base
and material things, or at least of temporal things. That
is true of the method and of the instruments I here
propose. The conversion of any society or of the world

RESTORATION 231

for that matter, is the work of Grace, and in so far as
men are the agents of Grace it is the work of example ;
it is Martyrs and Saints who will reintroduce the Faith,
in so far as it can be restored. But I am here speaking
only of particular and circumscribed action, because I am
speaking of a practical method towards a practical end.

Let us take these two terms in their order ; and first
the use of Print, before turning to the idea of a
Programme.

Print is an unsatisfactory, because a most imperfect,
method of communicating our ideas to our fellow men.
Especially is it unsatisfactory through its imperfection
when the ideas to be conveyed have all the magnitude
and multiplicity of that which is the greatest, most
diverse and yet most united of all conceptions, the Faith.
The true instrument for the general propagation of the
Faith, that is, the true social instrument as distinguished
from the personal instrument of example, is predication :
action by word of mouth. It was the method by which
the Church was founded ; it is' the method by which the
Faith has been maintained through the long centuries
of its action. But as things are here and now, our main
available method is the printing press. Through it only
do we reach the multitude. Through it in the main
must we reach the mass of men. Predication still plays
its part, especially in discussion with our fellows ; and
more particularly when a discussion or lecture or any
other form of predication is addressed to those who are
not of us. But upon the Press must we concentrate for
our chief effort ; and by it in the main shall we succeed
or fail.

Now the appeal of print falls into two very different
groups as things are now organized. There is first the
appeal of the book ; there is next the appeal of the
ephemeral press, the daily papers, the magazines and
reviews.

To work through the latter is to work under a very
heavy handicap ; the Faith is not “ news ” ; the public
approaches an article in a magazine or newspaper or

232 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

review with the object of receiving information on things
the appeal of which is already familiar to it, it desires
to hear of travel and tragedy, of comedy, of personalities
rendered famous or notorious by the events of the day.
On this account, unfortunately, the mass of Catholic
action aiming at Catholic effect upon one’s fellow men
is canalized into publications already earmarked, as it
were, for an audience already Catholic. It even comes to
be canalized into publications dealing particularly with
what may be called the domestic activities of the Church,
its services, its orders, its affairs “ of the household.”
And the affairs of the household are tedious or
meaningless to those not of the household.

We must, of course, use the ephemeral press to the
best of our power ; it reaches a thousand readers where
the book reaches one. The only wide avenue of approach
which we have through the Press and which is of some
value here is through notices of boob, the comments
issued to the public by reviewers, the occasional leading
articles. In these the message to be delivered will
necessarily be distorted by passage through a foreign
medium. The reviewer or leader-writer will as a rule
be puzzled by, or at least out of touch with, what any
book proceeding from the Catholic standpoint has to say.
Direct action through the ephemeral press we cannot
as yet make a principal instrument save in one particular
form. That form is the subsidized weekly serious review.

Let us get the elements of this proposition clearly
before us ; it is a matter on which I have myself a long
personal experience and to the conduct of which I can
testify.

Nothing is of greater effect upon opinion — though it
acts at long range and after a considerable delay — lag —
than a good capably-written, intelligent review of men,
letters and affairs. To have its full effect it should be
weekly, as I have said ; a monthly review is not without
value, but has less effect ; a quarterly today is of hardly
any effect at all, in the spread of an idea. It has
sometimes a certain literary value, but little else.

RESTORATION 233

Such weekly publications we are all familiar with on
the anti-Cathohc side, and particularly on the Red
side in politics. They almost invariably lose money.
They are subsidized either by advertisement revenue or
financial interests or private patrons ; they could not
appear without a considerable financial aid. There are
indeed some weekly reviews of a very large circulation,
and many of a considerable circulation, but none of them
could have that circulation if they were of the standard
I here presuppose. The selling price must be low, or
the paper wifi be without effect ; advertisement revenue
will be small, and it is absolutely essential that the review
should not be dependent upon it.

Therefore, I repeat, the venture of a high Weekly,
Catholic in tone, must expect a steady and regular loss.
It must be published in the anticipation of such a loss,
and a subsidy must be provided. That is the first
necessary point ; the second is that a competent Editor
having been chosen, he should have a good salary with
a long contract, and he should work entirely unfettered.
But in choosing him there are certain points to be borne
in mind and particularly that point which is my next in
this catalogue : namely, that the review must deal with
men and books and affairs and current politics with no
more than a minimum (if even a minimum) of direct
Catholic statement. Our rivals who propagate Com-
munism or semi-Communist philosophy and who in
nearly all cases are materialist and sceptical in tone,
would lose their influence at once if they were to put
down their doctrines in black and white and make the
discussion of their theories their principal object. The
cultural effect of this kind of publication is indirect.
There are plenty of organs and books in which one can
get direct discussion ; what is needed here is the
atmosphere and tone of the right side.

My third point is that the contributors must be paid
on a high scale. You do not permanently get good work
of a varied kind in any other fashion. Some writers will,
of course, give you unpaid work, but usually on a small

234 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

scale and within a narrow scope. You can trust to that
sort of enthusiasm for direct action, but never for indirect.

As to the amount of subsidy required, conditions differ
with every country. In England I have put it myself,
in a careful study of the business and a report thereon,
at three thousand pounds a year. The sum appears great
only because men, when they talk of journalism, always
think in terms of capitalism and profits, whereas we are
here considering an organ to be used for a special purpose
other than profit.

Now, such organs exist for the special purpose of
pushing a financial policy or any other policy connected
with great wealth and large expenditure. We must
follow suit. Nor is the expenditure appreciable com-
pared with that which is now to be found on all sides
upon activities other than this most important and
urgent one. Our missionary effort abroad, even our
quasi-charitable entertainments, reach a total sum of
money compared with which the subsidy of a good review
of this kind is insignificant : and I am convinced, both
by experience and from the nature of things, that nothing
can be of greater effect than a good intellectual weekly ;
and that effect is unattainable without devoting to it a
certain fixed annual subsidy.

Approach through the book is open to all of us ; it is
of slow effect as a rule and nearly always of indirect
effect, but it is the line of least resistance. The same
man who would not look at a newspaper or niagazine
article which seemed to him to be “ sectarian ” would
approach with interest a book which he knew to have a
special point of view, because he approaches the book
in a different mood from that in which he approaches his
daily paper or his magazine ; a more serious mood, a
more concentrated mood, and a mood prepared for the
discussion and presentation of ultimate things.

There are two provinces within which the work of the
book for the propagation of the Catholic culture and
spirit operates ; the first province is that directly
concerned with a philosophy of the Faith in all its

RESTORATION 235

aspects. Even boob of theology pure and simple have
an appeal to men who know not our theology or are
predisposed to hostility towards it. The presentation
and discussion through the pen by a Catholic mind of
general subjects — such as biography or travel — has a
wider appeal. A man has but to be a Catholic and to
have the Catholic culture in mind, nay, he need only
be in sympathy with that culture though hardly belonging
to it, to spread through whatever he writes upon the
past or the present the savour of Catholicism. He makes
it known indirectly in this fashion, and this is so true
that he does so even unconsciously.

Of the various forms in which this appeal through the
book can work, much the most valuable is the form of
histoiy. Make men acquainted at the very root of the
affair with this prime truth, that the Catholic Church
made the culture which we still precariously inherit, the
whole civilization in which our ancestry developed and
lived fully, and wherein we partially and uncertainly live
today, and that truth cannot but reflect upon the creative
value of this thing which he thus newly comes across
— the Catholic Church. Let a man understand that the
Catholic Church made Europe and through Europe the
societies which Europe has founded beyond the seas,
make him understand the phrase, “ Ecclesia Mater ” in
the sense of historical origins, and you have laid the
foundation for all that should follow.

He will in the very great majority of cases know nothing
of this truth to begin with. The characters which have
been presented to him as heroes of the historic past are,
for the most part, characters alien to and usually hostile
to Catholicism ; the chief characters of Catholic source
will have been presented to him as secondary or unworthy.
The historians whose worb he has been given as text-
books, those who inform the fiction he knows, the classics
of his tongue, the body of the literature with which he is
familiar, are the historians in opposition to ourselves.
Write down half a dozen names of English historians :
Macaulay, Carlyle, Gibbon, old Freeman, Motley, and

236 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

the modern writer Trevelyan (this last a typical product
of the highly anti-Catholic English Universities and
governing class).

From Gibbon the reader learns that the discussion of
those awful truths, by the definition of which our civiliza-
tion was created, was the futile pastime of absurd
theologians. He is also taught to believe in the same
pages that the coming of the Faith destroyed the high
culture of antiquity, and that we only returned to a full
civic life with the disruption of Christian unity at the
Renaissance and the Reformation.

Freeman tells him that his own people, the English,
are the descendants of an original superior stock — by
which he means the North Sea pirates — and that those
who are now, in Europe, nations hostile to the Catholic
Church, are the noble leaders of the world, are our
cousins, and are almost upon the same pinnacle as our-
selves. It is through such men that Prussia (generally
called Germany) and England have been presented as
twin stars of the first magnitude in the constellation of
Europe. He is taught that our institutions (which are in
truth Roman) proceeded like our blood from outer
barbarians, not from the Grseco-Roman power.

Carlyle (if we may call him an historian) put forward
as his first heroic figure Frederic of Prussia ; Macaulay
has a hero and a villain upon whom he expends his really
excellent rhetoric, and the hero is William III, a man
who was in real life a pervert and a character who dis-
gusted the mass of those who came across him ; the villain
is the King of France, the chief political figure of the
Catholic culture in his time. Motley, of course, writes
what is a mere panegyric of the Dutch Calvinist pluto-
cracy in conflict with Austria and Spain. One would
never guess from his pages that the power of these Dutch
rebels lay in their wealth, that a good half of those whose
government they took over were steadfast in the old reli-
gion, and that even now, after generations of oppression,
over four out of ten among the Dutch are strongly
Catholic.

RESTORATION 237

As for Trevelyan, he is, of course, nothing more than
the echo of his great-uncle Macaulav.

I give these names merely as examples, only one of them
is of the first rank — Gibbon. At any rate, the whole
picture of history, the whole presentation of our develop-
ment, is propaganda from the enemies’ camp.

Well, it is not difficult to rewrite history and to present
historical truth. The facts are there ; they have only to
be presented in their due order and proportion, those
which are commonly suppressed or unemphasized being
•given their high value, and those which have been
exaggerated put in their right place. I say the task is
easy save in one element ; industry. The work to be
undertaken is laborious, but it still lies almost un-
touched, though the beginnings of a reform in all this are
already apparent. It should be the business of all those
now entering the company of writers, even with those who
do not sympathize with that by which the world may be
saved, to re-establish the truth — if only for the interest
that truth has in itself.

Remember that the effect of such writing taken up by
an increasing number of men and continuously is in-
calculable. The Faith comes at first in the form of a
challenge ; it risks violent opposition ; but it has an
invaluable ally, to wit, mere fact : objective reality :
truth.

After history, fiction is, unfortunately, in our time
the next department of importance. But fiction which is
composed with the object of direct argument in favour of
the Faith is far less effective than fiction naturally
inspired by a knowledge of what the Faith is and its
effects upon Society. The intermediate department of
historical fiction is here particularly valuable ; for the
number of men and women who are affected by historical
fiction when it is well and vividly written is very much
greater than that of those affected by an historical
narrative alone.

Then there is the department of counter-attack ; the
criticism and demolition of the enemy’s works, the

238 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

negative action of exposure not unmixed with ridicule.
It is an encouragement to us in the great battle which
should be before us and which is perhaps already en-
gaged, that our opponents have already lost that frame-
work upon which they once depended ; their doctrinal
framework.

There are thus gaps in the line opposed to us ; there
are great voids due to this disappearance of the last
vestiges of the old certitudes of anti-Catholic philosophy
such as the Calvinists (that is, the Puritans) and the
Rationalists had adhered to. The advance of science has
not confirmed the old stark rationalism ; it has on the
contrary, dissolved it. And the advance of documentary
research and textual criticism has not confirmed the old
and solid Protestant attitude towards Christian origins.
It has so much undermined it that the mass of the edifice
is already crumbling. It appealed in its day irrationally
to the textual inspiration of the Jewish Scriptures ; it
proceeded by a vagary to the opposite extreme of what
has been called the “ higher criticism,” and now this
in its turn has broken down. It is our own fault if we
do not occupy the works that have been abandoned.

So much for Print : that imperfect, that insufficient,
but today that necessary instrument lying to our hand.

What of the second term in the proposition : a Pro-
gramme— a “ platform ? ”

Here we must distinguish carefully, and the distinction
we have to make may seem to some so subtle as to be
difficult to grasp. There cannot be a Catholic social
programme, a Catholic political ‘‘platform,” in the full
sense of the word “ Catholic.” This should be a com-
monplace and a truism : it follows from the very nature
of the Faith. The Church was not founded, has not
lived, for temporal purposes ; it was founded to save the
souls of men. Its life is properly devoted to that object.
Any social programme of reform presented for the solu-
tion of temporal ills is not only subsidiary to the general
task of Catholicism, but is also temporal — whereas the
Faith is concerned with the eternal.

RESTORATION 239

It should go without saying that an identification of the
Faith with any particular scheme of social arrangements is
both irrational and of evil effect. But a particular
programme, a particular “ platform,” to which men are
led in a particular crisis when temporal affairs have gone
awry, must necessarily arise.

Of two opposing solutions one must be more consonant
with the spirit of Catholicism than the other ; to meet an
un-Cathohc and still more an anti-Catholic solution of
our present strains by mere denunciation of it, leads
nowhere. When men are moved to violent indignation,
indignation so violent as to lead to the extreme of civil
war at the worst, and to the permanent threat of civil
disorder at the best, such indignation can only be
assuaged by the action of justice. The exploitation of
men through the mere action of wealth, the inhuman
postulates of what is called Capitalism, have led to a
breakdown.

We have before us the man who says : “ Rather than
bear any longer the gross injustice of my condition, the
cruel insecurity to which I am condemned, the arbitrary
imposition by force of other men’s orders to their own
profit and my detriment, rather than suffer exploitation
and the unbearable pressure of merely mechanical rela-
tions, I will destroy the society under which I have
suffered all these things. I will at once take my revenge
upon the rich to whom I am bound by no human tie of
loyalty or status — since my masters have themselves
denied the value of status and of the old human bonds —
and I will oust them. If I must be half-a-slave for their
profit I will be content to be a full slave only to the
community, so that none shall get wealthy through my
labour while I remain in despair. You tell me that in
destroying property I am destroying the family: I
answer that I and my fellows have had no property and
on that account even the bond of the family is nearly lost
among us. We will have done with it as with all the rest.
We will have a new world, though it means — and even
because it means — the violent destruction of the old.”

240 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

That is the spirit upon which Communism works, and
the whole present materialist revolt. The thing is at
heart an explosive uprising against injustice ; even those
who lead it are some of them inspired by a flaming sense of
justice, though the greater part, the more able, and cer-
tainly the more commanding, are inspired by something
very different ; being moved by hatred of all that which
made us what we are : that which made our art, and our
glory, as well as that which led us to our downfall.

Now in peril of that downfall, in peril of the loss of
that by which men should live, by which they did live (in
large degree) for centuries, by which the best instructed
of us would still desire to live, we must propose concrete
remedies. The great Encyclicals have suggested not
indeed a programme, but the spirit upon which a pro-
gramme could be defined.

For that programme the individual proposing it must
be responsible — not the Church. Though it proceed
from individuals who are themselves Catholic or in
sympathy with Catholicism, or even from those who only
perceive (as thousands are beginning to perceive more and
more clearly) that the Faith is the one effective barrier to
ruin — yet the programme is not in itself a Catholic
programme. It is open to full criticism and even to
denial by those who are just as much in sympathy with
Catholicism as its promoters. Let them then present
an alternative programme, for the programme is only
a means to an end ; it is what we conceive as individuals
to be the product of Catholic philosophy ; but its object
is not to achieve itself, but a Catholic society, or at any
rate to come on the way to such a society — a society in
which the Catholic sense of justice shall bear fruit.

We can propose certain institutions, the resurrection of
the Guild, of corporate effort, of self-governing industrial
bodies wherein the members shall be owners but owners
shielded from the effects of unbridled competition, the
extreme of which destroys the average man for the profit
of the wealthy.

Collegiate property happily we already have, the Great

RESTORATION 241

Orders are solidly established today on a strong economic
basis ; let us work for their expansion and for their action
not only in the educational but in the industrial field ; a
proposition that may seem novel but is, I think, fecund.

Let us work continually for the restoration of well-
divided property upon which economic freedom and
therefore the dignity and permanence of the family
depend. Let us propose its restoration by the working of
a differential tax and its confirmation, its guarantee of
endurance, by fundamental laws which control the
economic pressure of great accumulations.

Above all, let us not work in blinkers with our regard
confined to the palliatives of the moment. Let us not be
forever concerned with amelioration of the wage system,
seeing that the wage system itself is in the very texture of
the evils we propose to remedy. A living wage is an
immediate and imperative necessity ; things have come to
such a pass that failing such regulation Society cannot
continue. And the same is true of relief in every form.
In so far as small property has been destroyed, men who
should be owners can only live as wage-slaves or upon
public relief. But protest in favour of sufficient wages
does not get to the root of the matter.

Communism gets to the root of the matter and men
take to it because they clearly see that it does so.

An increasingly just division and permanence of
property until a determining number of owning
families shall thereby be economically free, would also
go to the root of the matter when and if it should appear
as a positive political scheme which can draw men towards
it, just as its immediate opponent, Communism, draws
them. It is a solution which even the most desperate
would understand and accept if they saw it at work.

Upon that note I close. It is a personal note, and I
certainly put it forward with no other intention, nor
attempt to excuse it by presenting the matter as one
wherein universal agreement must be expected. Even if

242 CRISIS OF OUR CIVILIZATION

such a programme be desirable, the pace at which it
should be achieved and the methods by which it should be
reached are matters for indefinitely wide debate. It is a
particular proposal, and it would be both false and
ridiculous to present it as a general one. But it is that
which has appealed to myself in the examination of the
very grave crisis upon which all this has turned, and I may
add that the crisis is one which does not permit of
indefinite delay.

INDEX

INDEX

Advertising, and Capital, 154, differ-
ential tax on, 201-2
Albigensian heresy, 85, 90
Alexander of Macedonia, 25-6
Alfred, King, 73-4
Angles, 60

Anti-clencalism, 227
Antomne period, 43-4
Apprenticeship, 222
Aragon, 80

Art and architecture, medieval, 81,
87, 93-4, 107
Augustan period, 43
Augustine, St., 60
Aurelian, Emperor, 44
Avignon, Popes at, 96-7

Banks, rise of, 130, 149, 177, transfer
of land to, 154, 208 , monopoly of,

213- 14, 216 , and foreign policy,

214- 15

“ Barbarians,” and Rome, 22, 49-50,
5*. 57-8
Berenganus, 85

Bishops, 37 , investiture of, 88-9 ,
revenues of, 99-101
Black Death, 106-7
Blanc, Louis, 184

Books, m propagation of Catholic
culture, 234-5, 237-8
Britain, Saxon invasion of, 59-60 ,
re-conversion of, 60-1 , Danish
invasion of, 62-3 ; Norman invasion
of, 63 , kingship m, 73-4 , Dark
Ages in, 123 , see airs England
Burgundians, 52

Byrantine Empire, 49-50, 52, 123,
and Mohammedanism , 58, 64 ; and
the Papacy, 82-3 ; Slavonic raiders
of, 63

Calvin, John, 116, 118; political
and social effects of, 117-18;
attitude of, to Church property,
126-7

Calvinism, 121-2

Capitalism, 164-6 ; development of,
121, 129-30, 143, 178 , and usury,
148-9, and machinery, 157-61,
and rapid communications, 161-2 ,
spiritual evils of, 167-9 , material
evils of, 169, 1 80- 1 , ways of
combatting, 170-1 , Communism
as remedy for, 171-4, 179, 193 ,
protests against evils of, 180-1 ,
Catholic remedy for, 194 el teg.
Carlyle, Thomas, 236
Carthage, 25-6
Caste, development of, 72-5
Castile, 80

Catholic Church, 32-6 , and a vibra-
tion, 3, 229 , v Communism, 6 ,
salvation m, 6 , conversion of Rome
to, 31-4, 40-3, 53 , persecution of,
36, 41-2 , method of expansion of,
36-7 , hierarchy of, 37-9 , and
decline of Graeco-Roman Empire,
45-8, 50, and slavery, 50-1, 70,
75-6 , separation of Eastern Church
from, 64, 90-1 , and Holy Roman
Empire, 82-3 , effects of spiritual
decline on, 94-5 , “ ossification ” of
structure of, 94, 97, in , comes to
rely on force, 94-5, 103-4, 112,
unworthy officers of, 94, 102 ,
revenues and endowments of, 97,
99-101, 111, 125-7 , need for

reform m, 112-14, status in, 139,
forbids usury, 144, 223 , Communism
the enemy of, 179, 187, 189,
necessity for world-conversion to,
195-6, 223-4 , methods of restoring
spirit of, 226 et teq , forces hostile
to, 227-30 , history m favour of,
228-9, 237

Cefalu, Cathedral of, 188-9
Cham stores, tax on, 200, under-

selling by, 218-19
Charlemagne, 61, 62a , 124
Chartist movement, 180

INDEX

246

Christendom, 9, 13 ; rile of, 3, 5, 9 et
seq , climax of, 3-4, 79, 89-92 ,
disruption of, 4-5, 10-11 , origins of,
20 , siege of, J7 et seq , “ annealing ”
of, 68-9 , unity of, 72, 122-3 ,
development of caste m, 72-5 ;
effect of spiritual decline on, 94 , loss
of unity m, 94-7, 1 12, 129, 132, 177
Christianity, 31-2

Church endowments, 99-100 ; misuse
of, 100-1, hi, looting of, at
Reformation, 115, 125-7
Civilization, the Church the founder
of, 3, 229 , cnsis of, 9-13 ; religion
and, 15-17

Clergy, in feudal communities, 71, 91
Clovis, 52-3
Cluny, abbey of, 82
Commune, the, 186
Communism, 6, 36, 132, 137, 143 ,
materialism of, 17, 185 ; die child
of Capitalism, 163, as cure for
Capitalism, 171-4, 179, 193, 241 ;
opposition to, 174-5 , enemy of
Catholic Church. 179-87, 189;

spreading of, 187 ; battle against,
188-9 , sources of strength of,
193-4 , spirit leading to, 239-40
Competition, unrestricted, 130, 137,
142-3, 150-7, 178, restriction of,
151-2, 200, 218, 223-4, doctrine of
free, 208-9

Constantine, Emperor, 48 , donation
of, 102

Constantinople, Mohammedan threat
to, 58-9, 86 , and blunder of Fourth
Crusade. 90-1 , see ala Byzantine
Empire

Contract, replaces status, 130. 137,
140-2, 167-8, 178

Craftsmen, medieval, 70-1 , tools of,
204-5, 219

Credit, and Capital, 1 56
Creeds, 40
Crusades, 81, 85-6

Danish invasions, 62-3

Dark Ages, 57 et teg., 79, 123 ;

intellectual activity in, 52-3
Darwin, Charles, 182-4
Determining number, 167, 224-5
Differential tax, for re-creating small

property, 196-9, 203, 241 ; upon
transfer, 199-200 ; on movable
enterprise, 200 , on land, 200-1 ,
on advertisements, 201
Diocletian, Emperor, 45
Dominic, St., 81, 89
Donation of Constantine, 102

Ebso, March of the, 80-1
Ecclesiastical courts, 113-14
Education, medieval, 87-8
Egypt, language in Graeco-Roman,
23 ; religion in, 28 ; Moham-
medanism in, 58, 65, 67
Ekklesia, the, 35, 37-8
Elevation of the Host, 85
England, medieval, 8i, 88 ; Parliament
of, 87 ; claim of, to French throne,
106 , Reformation in, 119-20, 125-6,
176, 226 , nse of Proletanamsm in,
130, 176-7, industrial, 158, 160,
lack of desire for ownership in,
206-7 1 antagonism to Catholicism
in, 227-8

English language, 61, 107
Epicureans, 27
Etruna, religion of, 28
Euchanst, the, 32, 34, 40
Evolution, 183

Faith, loss of, 131, 177-8, 229
Fathers, writings of the, 53
Feudalism, 69-77, 91
Fourth Crusade, 90-1
France, feudalism in, 74-5 ; rise of
monarchy in, 75, 85 , medieval, 81,
88 , capture of Papal See by, 96-7 ,
English King’s claim to, 106 ;
Reformation m, 115, n8-i9;adheres
to Papacy, 119, 126, 226; anti-
Catholics of, 226-7
Francis, St., 81, 89
Franks, 52, 57

Frederick II, Emperor, 90, 96
Freeman, E. A , 236

Gaul, belief in immortality in, 28 ;
conversion of, to Catholicism, 52-3 ;
pirate invasions of, 62 ; Mongols in,
63 ; Mohammedans driven from,
67-8 , stronghold of Christendom in
Dark Ages, 74, and Roman army,
123 , see ala France

INDEX

247

Geneva, Calvin in, 118
Germanic tribes, zi-2, 50, 61 ; con-
version of, 6zk., 63 , nse of caste
among, 73 ; and Holy Roman
Empire, 124

Germany, State-worship in, 16-17;
Reformation in, 114-15, 120, 126;
British loan to, 214-15 , Catholicism
in, 227

Gibbon, Edward, 236-7
Gothic architecture, 81, 87
Goths, 52, 57

Gra; co-Roman Empire, 9, 20 , extent
of, 21-2, languages m, 23-4;
administration in, 23, 29 , growth
of, 24-6 , religions of, 27-8 ; slavery
in, 29 , despair in, 30 , conversion
of, 30-1, 40-3, 53, 78 , persecution
of Church in. 41-2 ; material
decline of, 43-53 , disappearance of,
123-4 ; usury in, 144
Great Britain, loan of, to Germany,
214-15

Great Schism, 96-7
Greek Church, 58, 64, 96 ; and
blunder of Fourth Crusade,
90-1

Greek culture. 25-6
Greek philosophy, revival of, 105
Gregory VII, St., 82-3
Guilds, medieval, 70-1, 91, 125, 128,
decay of, 128-9, 141, 159, and
competition, 151-2, 218 , and the
contractor, 159, and Communism,
171 ; re-estabhshment of, 194-6,
205, 217-22, 240 ; vital principles of,
220-2

Hxmw. 24

Henry of Navane, 1 19

Heresy, 85 , tendency to, 102, 111-12 ;

use of force against, 103
History, writing of, 14-19 ; and
legend, 98-95 on side of Catholicism,
228-9, z35' 237 > biased, 235-6
Holland, Reformation m, 126 , Catholic
minority of, 226, 236
Holy Roman Empire, 124, and the
Papacy, 82-3, 88, 96
Hospitals, endowment of, 99, 125
Huesca, Parliament of, 87

Huguenots, 119
Hundred Years’ War, 106
Hungary, Mongols settle m, 63,
80

Hunn, case of, 1 14
Huss, John, 114

Incarnation, 189
Indulgences, 98, 102, 1 14-15
Innholders, guild of, 129*.

Ireland, conversion of, 61 , desire for
ownership of land in, 206-7
Italy, Normans in, 84, adheres to
Papacy, 126 , anti- Catholics of,

Jans bnism, 119
Jerome, St , 47
Jerusalem, Crusaders take, 86
Jews, 185 ; in Grieco-Roman
Empire, 27, and Russian Revolution,
186

Julian the Apostate, 46, 10311
Justin, St , 40

“ Kapital, Das,” 182, 185

Lanctranc, 85

Land, post-war change of ownership
of, 153-4, 207-8 , tax on transfer of,
200-1 , desire for ownership of,
205-7

Legend, growth of, 98-9
Literature, medieval vernacular, 87,
108

London Guilds, 129
Luther, Martin, 1 14
Lutheranism, 120

Macaulay, Lord, 236
Machinery, growth of, 157-61
Magna Charts, 81
Manchester School, 181
Manning, Cardinal, 178
Marcus Aurelius, Emperor, 44
Martin V, Pope, 97
Marx, Karl, 182, 184-5
Masses, 98, 102

Matenahim, 181-5, religion of, 17;
Calvin the spiritual father of,
117-18

INDEX

248

Middle Agee, 78-81 ; climax of, 79,
89-92 , new energy of, 83-$, 95 ,
growth of uutitutioni in, 86-7 , art
in, 87, 93-4 , decline of, 93 et seq ,
spiritual decline in, 94-5, 104-8,
in, growth of doubt in, 101 ;
growth of knowledge and dis-
coveries in, 102, 105, 121 ; material
advance in, 121-2 , social philosophy
of, 127-8 j stability of property in,
204-5

Mesopotamia, Mnhamm^Hanipn in,
58, 67

Mohammed, 65-6

Mohammedanism, 3, 80-1 ; rise of,
58-9, 64-7 , spread of, 67-8 ,
Crusade against, 86 , penalizing of
usuiy by, 1440.

Monarchy, rise of, 75, 84-5 , and
Parliament, 86-7

Monasteries, revenues of, 99 , dissolu-
tion of, 125, 128
Mongols, 61, 63, 80
Monopoly, 155, 209-10, control of,
194-6, 208-17 > inevitability of,
201, 211-12, “natural,” 213,

financial, 213-16
Mortuaries, payment of, 1 1 2- 13
Motley, J L.,236
Muret, Battle of, 81

Naplis, Kingdom of, 84
Nationalism, rise of, 5, 88, 97, 124,
modern rehgion of, 16
Natural selection, 183-4
Navarre, 80
“ Norman French,” 62
Normandy, 84-5 , Norsemen m, 62
Normans, 83-4

North Africa, Roman, 23, 26, 50 ,
Mohammedan, 58-9, 64, 67, 144a.

Osage, A R„ 155
“ Origin of Species, The,” 182-4
Overseas trade, 140-1, 177
Owen, Robert, 180

P Austin*, language in, 23-4
Papacy, struggle of, against lay-power,
82-3, 88, 96, the Great Schism
and, 96-7 , attacks on authority of.

Parliament, rise of, 86-7
Parliamentarism, and Calvin, 1 1 7
Patent mediants, 155
Peasantry, 69. 91, 121. 128, 141
Penty, Mr , 220
Persia, 24

Philosophy, and religion, 15-17
Plantagenets, 81. 88
Platonic school, 27
Poland, and Communism, 187
Poles, 63-4
Poor relief, 169
Predestination, 116
Presbuteros, 37, 381s.

Press, in propagation of Catholic
culture, 231-4
Printing, 105-6
Profit, working for, 165-6
Proletariat, nee of, 130, 137-8, 143,
150, 175, agricultural, 176-7
Proletanamsm, 164-6, chief evils of,
167-70 , and Matenabsm, 185-6
Property, redistribution of, 170-2,
194-6, 202, 241 , rights of, 180-1 ,
Communism and, 185-7 ; recreation
of small, 196-202 , register of, 199 ;
stability of, 203-5 , inheritance of,
204 , lack of desire to possets,
205-7 > »nd Guilds, 221
Protestantism, 116. 131 , spread of,
119-20 , effects of, 176-8
Provence, 84

Prussia, knowledge of Catholicism in,
227

Puritans, 119

Railways, 161 , nationalizing of, 173
Reformation, 4-5, 93-4, in et seq ;
gives opportunity for loot, 1 1 5 ,
social changes due to, 117-18,
121, 127-32 , political changes due
to, 122 ; ultimate consequences of,
135 et seq , 164 et seq.

Religion, determining factor in aviliza-
tion, 15-17

“ Restoration of Property, The,” 202*.
Robert the Devil, Duke of Normandy,
*3

Rollo, 62

Roman army, 26, 44; change in.

48-50, 52, 123

INDEX 249

Roman Empire, i« Graeco-Roman
Empire

Roman Law, 140

Rome, 21 ; origins of, 25 , Popes’
separation from, 96-7
Russia, Communism in, 179, 186-7,
Revolution in, 186

Subsidization of small investments,
197-9

Superstition, growth of, 97-8
Switzerland, Reformation in, uj, 118,
126

Syria, Mohammedanism in, 58, 65,
67 , Crusaders in, 86

Sacraments , doubts on validity of,
85,102,111
Salon invasions, 59-60
Scandinavian pirates, 57, 59-63, 80
Schools, 88 , endowments of, 99. 125
Sceptics, 27
Science, 105, 238

Scotland, misuse of Church property
in, 101 , Reformation in, 119, 126 ,
industrial, 160
Serfdom, 69-70, 75-6, 139
Sicily, Normans in, 84
Slavery, the basis of Grseco-Roman
society, 29 , humanization of, 50-1 ,
changes to serfdom, 69-70, 75-6,

return to. 76, 224

Slavonic tribes, 22, 50 , raids and
conversion of, 63-4, 80
Socialism, 5, 180-1 , forerunner of
Communism, 137, 143, 163, 185,
and monopoly, 210-11
Spam, Roman, 23, 26, 52, Moham-
medans in, 58-9, 64, 67 , reconquest
of, 80-1, 84, adheres to Papacy,
126 , Communism in, 179, 188
State control, 171-3 , of monopoly,
210-16

Status, 76-7, 138-40 , replaced by
contract, 130, 137, 140-2, 178 ,
and competition, 151 , and moral
sanction, 167
Steam engine, 158, 161

Teixgrapht, 162

Thomas Aquinas, St , 81, 89, 105, 117
Towns, growth of, 160
Tradition, importance of, in history,
18-19, ,0®

Transfer, differential tax on, 199
Transport, mechanized, 161-2
Transformism, 182-3
Trent, Council of, 120
Trevelyan, G. M., 236-7

Undihsilling, 156, 219
United States, and Catholicism, 226,
228

Universities, 88 , endowments of, 99
Urban II, Pope, 86
Usury, 130, 132, 142-50, 178 , Catholic
Church and, I44, 223 , meaning of,
145-7 > results of, 148-50

Vandals, 52, 57

Venice, and Fourth Crusade, 90

Vienna, Mohammedan threat to, 68

Wage-slavxkt, 157, 160, 206, 241
Warsaw, Battle of, 1 87
Whitby, Church council at, 61
William the Conqueror, 83
Wychffe, John, 102, 114
Wyndham Act, 207

Yarmux, Battle of the, 67-8